Preserving African American History in Boston

From the Boston Globe, by Brian R. Ballou, on September 23, 2007: Peeling back the layers of years from the walls of the African Meeting House on Beacon Hill and restoring it to circa 1855 has been a slow, painstaking process. Doorknobs, cast-iron posts, and even the bricks used back then need to be exactly the same, and they are not exactly easy to find these days.

"All those kinds of things that we rebuild have to be authentic," said Beverly Morgan-Welch, director of the Museum of African-American History in Boston, which cares for the meeting house, originally a church built in 1806. The bricks that will be used to rebuild the walls will be fired in a kiln the same way they were in the 1850s, she said.

The rebuilding effort at the meeting house, as well as renovations that continue at the Old State House, roughly a minute's walk away, are the focus of "Revolution in Boston," a special segment produced by the History Channel as part of their Emmy Award-winning series, "Save our History."

Yesterday evening, Morgan-Welch and about a score of others gathered at the meeting house and watched a screening of the segment.

"There are a number of people or organizations that have begun to understand the importance of what is being done, including the History Channel," Morgan-Welch said.

The African Meeting House is the nation's oldest standing church built and used by blacks. It was a gathering place for black abolitionists, for free blacks who escaped from slavery, and for Boston's intellectual elite, who forged ideas that would help end slavery.

William Lloyd Garrison founded the New England Anti-Slavery Society there in 1832, and Frederick Douglass gave an antislavery speech there in 1860. For years, it served as a beacon of black accomplishment.

Renovations to the meeting house started 15 months ago, but they are on hiatus while fund-raising takes center stage. About $3 million has been raised, but another $5 million is needed to complete the reconstruction, the major work of which remains to be done. So far, most of the work has involved excavating and preparing the site for construction. Beacon Hill, with its narrow busy roads and tight alleys, is not ideal for construction. "Boston is a city on a hill, a trimount city, and we're on the rockiest, most difficult trimount," Morgan Welch said.

Blueprints were recreated and architects from John G. Waite and Associates have also been relying on photographs taken when the meeting house was transformed into a synagogue, from the early 1900s to 1972, when the museum acquired it. "It will be absolutely accurate," Morgan-Welch said. "We hired the best historic architects in the country."

The Old State House, built in 1713, accommodated the government offices of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and, when fervor to oppose the British crown was stirred, hosted speeches and stirring debates by patriots. In July 1776, the Declaration of Independence was first announced to the residents of Boston from the building's balcony. Today, the building is owned by the city and operated by the Bostonian Society, perhaps the city's top historical group.

Restoration of the African Meeting House on Beacon Hill includes new windows. Work began about 15 months ago. (ARAM BOGHOSIAN FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE)

The History Channel program takes a detailed look at the rebuilding efforts while explaining the role the two buildings had in the nation's fight for independence and equality. The show examines the work done on the northeast corner and the attic of the Old State House, said Brian Le May, Bostonian Society's executive director. "I've seen rough footage . . . and it promises to be interesting."

And it certainly won't hurt tourism in town, he added. (source: The Boston Globe)




Preserving African American History in Boston

Thaddeus Stevens

Thaddeus Stevens

Fergus M. Bordewich writes: Seventy-five years old, with less than two years left to live, and in almost constant pain from a variety of ailments, Stevens focused his efforts on a new amendment to the Constitution, the Fourteenth, which would prohibit states from abridging equality before the law, and bar former Confederates from office and from voting in national elections until 1870. Although Stevens felt that the measure did not go far enough, it would totally change the states’ relationship to the federal government, by making it explicit that Americans were citizens of their nation first, and of their respective states second, and that states were therefore bound to abide by federal law. It was a truly revolutionary measure in the South where, in the pre-war effort to suppress criticism of slavery, states had passed laws limiting freedom of the press, the freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly, and even imposing censorship of the U.S. mail.

THE RADICALS WERE APPALLED when they realized that Lincoln’s successor, Tennessee-born Andrew Johnson, intended to allow the rebel states to speedily reenter the Union, without significant punishment of rebel leaders, or plans to protect the rights of newly-freed slaves. Their worst fears were confirmed when, in spite of the Fourteenth Amendment, passed in 1866, the President permitted elected assemblies of former Confederates to enact new laws designed to reduce freedmen to semi-slavery, as anti-black rioting swept Southern cities, leaving hundreds of African-Americans dead. Stevens had himself carried in a chair onto the floor of the House, and in a voice so weak that his colleagues had to crowd around him to hear him, he pleaded with his colleagues to consider what was at stake in the South. “While the South has been bleeding at every pore, Congress has done nothing to protect the loyal people there, white or black, either in their persons, in their liberty, or in their property,” he whispered. Stevens got what he wanted, and federal troops returned to the South. It is said that the speech was one of the few ever delivered in Congress that resulted in the changing of votes on the spot. Stevens’s last battle was a losing one, however. He led the effort to impeach Johnson for firing the Radical members in his cabinet, a movement that failed—by a single vote—to oust the president from office.

Thaddeus Stevens

“Stevens was ahead of his time because he truly believed in racial equality,” Says Hans Trefousse, author of “Thaddeus Stevens: Nineteenth Century Egalitarian”. “Without Stevens, the effects of Reconstruction, the Fourteenth Amendment and the Fifteenth Amendment, guaranteeing suffrage to the freedmen, would have been impossible.” Although he would not live to see the enactment of the Fifteenth Amendment, in 1870, no one had worked harder or longer to make it a reality. Says Trefoussse, “In practice, those amendments were effectively nullified in the South, in the years after the end of Reconstruction. But they were still in the law. In the twentieth century, they would remind Americans of what they had once stood for: they were still there as the standard that the nation had set for itself.”

Thaddeus Stevens

The North won the Civil War, but lost the remembrance of it. By 1877, federal troops had been completely withdrawn from the South. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments were systematically undone by a combination of harsh discriminatory laws and the terrorism of vigilante organizations like the Ku Klux Klan. The South, and indeed most of the nation, slumped into almost a century of entrenched racism and institutionalized segregation. In the memory of a country committed to reconciliation at the expense of the rights of African-Americans’ rights, there was little place for the furious idealism of an egalitarian like Stevens.

The nadir in Stevens’s reputation was reached with D.W. Griffith’s classic 1915 film “The Birth of A Nation,” a Civil War epic which heroized the Klan, and smeared blacks as clownish and lascivious monsters whose freedom endangered American democracy. (President Woodrow Wilson liked the film so much that he gave it a private showing at the White House.) Stevens was portrayed as a vengeful hypocrite, plotting with his diabolical black mistress to instigate a race war against helpless Southern whites. Someone who learned about Stevens only from the film might have supposed that he and Lydia Hamilton Smith were the source of all the nation’s racial problems. Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, James Buchanan’s stock steadily rose, at least in Lancaster, and in the 1930's Wheatland was restored to its luxurious mid-nineteenth century splendor. When the Lancaster Historical Society published a guidebook to important sites in the city’s downtown, in 1962, Stevens’s home wasn’t even included on the map.

Law Office and Home of Thaddeus Stevens, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 1868

AS SNOWFLAKES SWIRLED and danced over the streets of Lancaster, Jim Delle and I walked through the row house where Thaddeus Stevens lived, just a block from Penn Square where in times gone by crowds of supporters once roared to his surging oratory. The years have taken a heavy toll. The house’s modest Georgian facade has been covered over with ugly white modern bricks, and a garage door has been punched through the front of Stevens’s front parlor. Decrepit industrial carpeting, broken plaster, and scrawled graffiti cast a mournful pall through his one-time law office. Behind the house, Delle scraped the snow off the sheet of plywood that covered the broken crown of the cistern, and we climbed down into it on an aluminum ladder. In the dank brick compartment, Delle pointed out the small aperture through which fugitives had crawled from the tunnel that led to the tavern basement next door. The cistern was more than an exotic hiding place. It was physical proof of Stevens’s personal commitment not just to the abstract principle of emancipation, but in the most personal way possible to the men and women who suffered under slavery.

Wheatland - Home of James Buchanan, 15th President of the United States

Wheatland was built by William Jenkins, a lawyer, who built and named the Federal mansion in 1828. Buchanan purchased the property - three tracts totalling 22.45 acres (90,900 m2), including the mansion and several outbuildings, in December 1848 from William Morris Meredith, a Philadelphia lawyer.Buchanan resided here on occasion as President and after his term until his death

I kept thinking of the fiery, iron-willed, silver-tongued man who had made this refuge possible, at a time when harboring fugitive slaves was a federal crime. He had died thinking himself a failure. But he had paved the way for the civil rights advances of the twentieth century. In the 1950's and 1960's, the nation would have to learn again the lesson that Stevens tried to teach in the 1860's, that the rights of African-Americans could only be protected by the power, and occasionally the armed force, of the federal government. Had land been distributed to the ex-slaves as Stevens wished, the nation might well have been spared much of the shameful racial history that followed, and might instead have created a stable, economically and politically independent black middle class. After generations of neglect, however, his greatest work, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, still lay waiting for Americans to rediscover their meaning, and they became the foundation upon which was erected virtually all the civil rights legislation that reshaped the country since the 1960's.

Whether enough of Stevens’s home survives intact to become a museum dedicated to him and to the regional activities of the Underground Railroad, as local preservationists wish, is still an open question. Developers agreed after considerable local protest to leave about half of Stevens’s house standing, but they maintain that the rest must be leveled to make room for the new convention center. “We can’t just walk away from this house,” says Randy Harris, the former director of the Lancaster Preservation Trust, who has fought to prevent the demolition of the house and the adjoining properties that belonged to Stevens. “Stevens is way too important a figure in our history to abandon once again.” —Fergus M. Bordewich

(source: "Thaddeus Stevens and James Buchanan: How their Historic Rivalry Shaped America," by Fergus M. Bordewich. This article originally appeared as “Was James Buchanan Our Worst President? Digging into a Historic Rivalry” in Smithsonian Magazine, February 2004.)

Abolition Medallion

Abolition Medallion 1834

This medal was given to all school children in Tewkesbury schools in 1834 to celebrate the abolition of slavery in the British Empire.

This side depicts a freed slave with a radiant light shining upon him. His arms are raised to heaven and he holds broken manacles in his hands.

Under his feet is a broken whip and broken manacles lay on the ground around him.

He stands by a broad leaf plant – either tobacco or sugar cane – and around the edge of the medal is verse 23 from psalm 118: ‘This is the Lord's doing; It is marvelous in our eyes’. In the background there is a hut and palm trees.

The centre top of the medal has a suspension hole so it can be worn. The other side of the medal has the following text: "In commemoration of the extinction of colonial slavery throughout the British Dominions in the reign of William the IV August 1, 1834".

The Slavery Abolition Act that outlawed slavery in British colonies was passed on August 23, 1833.

On August 1, 1834 all slaves in the British Empire were emancipated, but those still working were indentured to their former owners in an "apprenticeship" system, which was not abolished until 1838.

Slave owners received massive amounts of compensation, but the slaves received nothing. (source: Bolton Museum and Archive Service, UK)

Mightier Than The Sword: “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and the Battle for America

Mightier Than The Sword: “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and the Battle for America

By David S. Reynolds; Illustrated. 351 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $27.95

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From the New York Times Book Review on June 24, 2011, "The Impact of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’" reviewed by Andrew Delbanco:



No less an authority than Leo Tolstoy included “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” on his short list of “examples of the highest art flowing from love of God and man.” Fifty years later, James Baldwin called the same book a “very bad novel” full of “excessive and spurious emotion.” What goes on here? The question belongs in the present tense because it is by no means settled.



There’s nothing unsettled, however, about “Mightier Than the Sword,” David S. Reynolds’s informative account of the writing, reception and modern reputation of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Reynolds unstintingly celebrates its author, Harriet Beecher Stowe, as a colossal writer who mobilized public opinion against slavery, and proved, against long odds, “a white woman’s capacity to enter into the subjectivity of black people.”



The novel began to germinate in Stowe’s mind while she was living in Cincinnati in the 1830s and ’40s, where she met fugitive slaves who had escaped through or from Kentucky, and where, as Reynolds puts it, “she loved spending time in the kitchen with servants like the African-American Zillah.” In the spring of 1850, having moved to Maine, where she followed the Congressional debates over a proposed new law that would deny fugitive slaves basic rights while imposing new penalties on anyone harboring them, she wrote to a magazine editor that “the time is come when even a woman or a child who can speak a word for freedom and humanity is bound to speak.” The result was a series of fictional sketches of slaves under physical or psychological assault — among them, the beautiful Eliza, who escapes from bounty hunters by leaping from ice floe to ice floe across the Ohio River with her baby in her arms; the brooding Cassy, who belongs to the brutal Simon Legree; and Tom himself, whose gentleness and generosity grow apace as he is sold farther and farther south, eventually to Legree, who torments and tortures him before ordering his overseers to beat him to death.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

When the magazine pieces were gathered and published in 1852 as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Or, Life Among the Lowly,” the first print run was 5,000. Within a year, the book had sold 300,000 copies in America, and over a million in Britain. As Reynolds points out, a contemporary periodical noted that the number of people who encountered the story may have been 10 times the number who bought the book — since it came out in an era when reading aloud was a common practice among family and friends.



If ever there was a publishing event to prove the principle that timing is everything, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was it. On both sides of the sectional divide the timber was dry — and Stowe struck the igniting spark. In the North, Frederick Douglass rejoiced that she had “baptized with holy fire myriads who before cared nothing for the bleeding slave.” In the South, her indictment of slavery through the odious figure of Legree was likened to a “malignant” attack on the institution of marriage, as if she had chosen a wife-beater to represent “the normal condition of the relation” between loving spouses.



A decade after the book appeared, Abraham Lincoln is said to have received Stowe at the White House with the greeting, “Is this the little woman who made this great war?” No one knows if Lincoln really said that, and as the historian David Potter once put it, “history cannot evaluate with precision the influence of a novel upon public opinion.” But Reynolds is sure that the influence of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was immense.



Not only, he says, had Stowe “paved the way” for Lincoln’s election, but after her death she may have helped Lenin, who admired her novel, evade the czar’s agents by escaping from Finland over “the breaking ice of the moderately frozen Orfjarden Sound.” Through stage versions of the novel, she helped Henry James develop a sense of “human feelings as performative and theatrical.” Through Chinese and Portuguese translations, she inspired anticolonialism in China and emancipation in Brazil, and she taught the advertising firm J. Walter Thompson how “great masses of people can be influenced through their emotions.”



Reynolds is a rewarding researcher. He illuminates the innumerable “Tom shows” that became a staple of American popular entertainment, as well as the use of Uncle Tom’s image to sell jigsaw puzzles, dolls, card games, stockings and — grotesquely enough — licorice. He identifies stage and screen stars who accepted (Betty Grable, Judy Garland) or refused (Lena Horne, Paul Robeson) roles based on Stowe’s characters. One film performance is surely still worth watching: Little Eva — the angelic white girl who dies after befriending Tom — as played by Lou Costello.

Reynolds has insightful things to say about Stowe’s efforts “to present Southerners as favorably as possible” even as she excoriated their peculiar institution. And in surveying Uncle Tom’s postpublication career, he makes a number of striking points. He suggests, for example, that it may have been Frederick Douglass who first used the term “Uncle Tom” as a pejorative epithet denoting the shuffling docility of a submissive black man, and he traces the ups and downs of the novel’s reputation — high in the Civil War years, low during much of the 20th century, when the romanticized account in Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone With the Wind” (1936) largely supplanted Stowe’s version of the antebellum South. Today, Reynolds says, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is again “one of the must-reads of American literature.”

s such, it is a challenging book with which to come to terms. In my experience, students can be embarrassed by it. They recognize it as a valuable document for understanding the history of what we now call the “conversation” about race in America. In response to the prevailing view of black people as inferior beings (a view long held in the North as well as the South), it lifted its black characters to the status of impossibly virtuous victims — just the elevation that James Baldwin felt was a kind of contempt. When Baldwin called Stowe less a novelist than an “impassioned pamphleteer,” he meant, in part, that her characters don’t seem capable of selfishness as well as self-sacrifice, or of pettiness and jealousy along with piety and wisdom. In short, they don’t seem human. Reynolds calls Baldwin’s a “blinkered critique,” though he concedes that Stowe trafficked in the clichés of “romantic racialism” while reminding us, fairly enough, that what now seems “like racial stereotyping” was “progressive” in her day.

Still, we are left at the end of this book with the unsettling question of how to think about “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” as part of our cultural inheritance. The case for it as a literary work of depth and nuance is dubious. Yet it belongs to the very short list of American books (including, say, “The Other America” by Michael Harrington and “Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson) that helped create or consolidate a reform movement — in Stowe’s case, the most consequential reform movement in our history. Perhaps the fact that readers today have trouble taking seriously its heroes and villains is a tribute to its achievement — since, in some immeasurable way, it helped bring on the war that rendered unimaginable the world that Stowe attempted to imagine.

City Talk: David Reynolds, author "Mightier than the Sword"

The song "John Brown's Body"

Old John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave,
While weep the sons of bondage whom he ventured all to save;
But though he lost his life in struggling for the slave,
His truth is marching on.

Chorus:
Glory, Glory, Hallelujah!
His truth is marching on!

John Brown was a hero, undaunted, true and brave;
Kansas knew his valor when he fought her rights to save;
And now though the grass grows green above his grave,
His truth is marching on.
Chorus

He captured Harpers Ferry with his nineteen men so few,
And he frightened "Old Virginny" till she trembled through and through,
They hung him for a traitor, themselves a traitor crew,
But his truth is marching on.
Chorus

John Brown was John the Baptist for the Christ we are to see,
Christ who of the bondsman shall the Liberator be;
And soon throughout the sunny South the slaves shall all be free.
For his truth is marching on.
Chorus

The conflict that he heralded, he looks from heaven to view,
On the army of the Union with its flag, red, white, and blue,
And heaven shall ring with anthems o'er the deeds they mean to do,
For his truth is marching on.
Chorus

Oh, soldiers of freedom, then strike while strike you may
The deathblow of oppression in a better time and way;
For the dawn of old John Brown was brightened into day,
And his truth is marching on.
Chorus

John Brown's Body

Harpers Ferry and John Brown

John Brown

John Brown's plan seemed fairly straightforward: he and his men would establish a base in the Blue Ridge Mountains from which they would assist runaway slaves and launch attacks on slaveholders. At least that was the plan that the militant abolitionist had described to potential funders in 1857. But his plans would change. He had been ready in 1858 to launch his war -- he had both the men and the money to proceed. Brown was asked to postpone the launch, though, because one of his followers had threatened to reveal the plan -- a threat that the blackmailer did follow through on. So Brown agreed to go into hiding.

The following summer, after a one-year delay, Brown was eager to get underway. He rented a farm in Maryland, across the Potomac River from Harpers Ferry. Here he assembled his arms and waited for his "army" to arrive.

The delay had an adverse effect on Brown's plan. Many of the men he had recruited the previous year had changed their minds, moved away, or simply didn't think the plan would work. Even Henry Highland Garnet, the radical abolitionist who advocated insurrection, didn't have faith in the plan, believing that slaves were unprepared. Brown also met with Frederick Douglass in August of 1859, when Brown told his friend of his intentions of seizing the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry rather than staging guerrilla warfare from the mountains. Attacking the arsenal was in effect attacking the federal government and, in Douglass' estimation, a grave mistake. "You're walking into a perfect steel-trap," he said to Brown, "and you will never get out alive."

Map of Harper's Ferry Virginia (now West Virginia)

On October 16, Brown set out for Harpers Ferry with 21 men -- 5 blacks, including Dangerfield Newby, who hoped to rescue his wife who was still a slave, and 16 whites, two of whom were Brown's sons. Leaving after sundown, the men crossed the Potomac, then walked all night in heavy rain, reaching the town at 4am. They cut telegraph wires, then made their assault. First they captured the federal armory and arsenal. They then captured Hall's Rifle Works, a supplier of weapons to the government. Brown and his men rounded up 60 prominent citizens of the town and held them as hostages, hoping that their slaves would join the fight. No slaves came forth.

The local militia pinned Brown and his men down. Under a white flag, one of Brown's sons was sent out to negotiate with the citizens. He was shot and killed. News of the insurrection, relayed by the conductor of an express train heading to Baltimore, reached President Buchanan. Marines and soldiers went dispatched, under the leadership of then Colonel Robert E. Lee. By the time they arrived, eight of Brown's 22-man army had already been killed. Lee's men moved in and quickly ended the insurrection. In the end, ten of Brown's men were killed (including two blacks and both of his sons), seven were captured (two of these later), and five had escaped.

Brown, who was seriously wounded, was taken to Charlestown, Virginia (now Charles Town, West Virginia), along with the other captives. There they were quickly tried, sentenced, then executed. John Brown's statements during his trial reached the nation, inspiring many with his righteous indignation toward slavery. The raid ultimately hastened the advent of the Civil War.

(source: PBS)

Harpers Ferry and John Brown


This Outlook program focuses on Harpers Ferry, West Virginia (previously Virginia). The first section explores the birth and history of this pre-civil war, industrial town. The second section focuses on the abolitionist, John Brown, and his raid on the armory and town of Harpers Ferry. Produced by Bob Wilkinson, Cecelia Mason, and Larry Dowling.

Uncle Tom's Cabin

Uncle Tom's Cabin had a tremendous impact. The character Uncle Tom is an African American who retains his integrity and refuses to betray his fellow slaves at the cost of his life. His firm Christian principles in the face of his brutal treatment made him a hero to whites. In contrast, his tormentor Simon Legree, the Northern slave-dealer turned plantation owner, enraged them with his cruelty. Stowe convinced readers that the institution of slavery itself was evil, because it supported people like Legree and enslaved people like Uncle Tom. Because of her work, thousands rallied to the anti-slavery cause.Southerners were outraged, and declared the work to be criminal, slanderous, and utterly false. A bookseller in Mobile, Alabama, was forced out of town for selling copies. Stowe received threatening letters and a package containing the dismembered ear of a black person. Southerners also reacted by writing their own novels. These depicted the happy lives of slaves, and often contrasted them with the miserable existences of Northern white workers.

Most black Americans responded enthusiastically to Uncle Tom's Cabin. Frederick Douglass was a friend of Stowe's; she had consulted him on some sections of the book, and he praised the book in his writings. Most black abolitionists saw it as a tremendous help to their cause. Some, however, opposed the book, seeing Uncle Tom's character as being too submissive and criticized Stowe for having her strongest black characters emigrate to Liberia.

It is ironic that the book which contributed most to the anti-slavery cause should have gained the reputation it has today as a racist work. Uncle Tom, though he defies white authority to save his fellow slaves, is the model of Christian humility. He is forgiving in the face of absolute brutality and suffers countless indignities with patience. Though this endeared him to whites and helped them see the evils of slavery, it also encouraged the image of the submissive, childlike black man -- an idea exaggerated in theatrical productions of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Many of these showed Uncle Tom as a groveling, subservient character, and included blackface mistrel shows between scenes.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Like most white writers of her day, Harriet Beecher Stowe could not escape the racism of the time. Because of this, her work has some serious flaws, which in turn have helped perpetuate damaging images of African Americans. However, the book, within its genre of romance, was enormously complex in character and in its plots. The book outraged the South, and in the long run, that is its significance. (source: PBS series "Africans in America")

New York University's English Professor, Dr. Cyrus R.K. Patell, discusses Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.

• Get the Spark Notes on Uncle Tom's Cabin here.
• Read the entire book, Uncle Tom's Cabin, online for free here.
• Purchase Uncle Tom's Cabin, here.