(chiming music)
- Good afternoon.
For our really important
lectures, we don't just introduce
the speaker, we introduce somebody
who is going to introduce the speaker.
So my name is Joe Duggan,
and I'm the introducer
of the introducer, I'm the Acting Dean
of the Graduate Division.
I'm very pleased along
with the Graduate Council
to present David Brion
Davis, this year's speaker
in the Jefferson Memorial Lecture Series.
As a condition of this
bequest, I'd like to tell you
how the endowment supporting the lectures
came to UC Berkeley.
The Jefferson Memorial Lectures
were established in 1944
through a bequest from Elizabeth Bonestell
and her husband Cutler L. Bonestell.
A prominent San Francisco
couple, the Bonestells
cared deeply for history,
and in hope that the lectures
would encourage students,
faculty, visiting scholars,
and others to study the
legacy of Thomas Jefferson
and to explore values inherent
in American democracy.
Past lecturers, including
Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick,
Senator Alan Simpson,
Representative Thomas Foley,
Walter LaFeber, and
Archibald Cox have delivered
Jefferson Memorial Lectures
on early American history
about Jefferson himself,
and on American institutions
and policies in politics,
economics, education, and law.
There's a list of the
former Jefferson lecturers
on the back of your program.
And now I welcome Harry Scheiber,
a recent field professor
of law and history
and Director of the Earl
Warren Legal Institute,
and the Chair of the Jefferson Committee.
So he wears three hats at
once, and that's a trick.
I welcome him to the podium to introduce
our speaker for this evening, thank you.
(audience applauding)
- Thank you very much.
It's a very special pleasure
to introduce our speaker today,
whose biography is in
your hands in short form,
and it was told to me
the shorter, the better.
I was happy to comply
with him, his request,
because I know you're here, you're present
to hear him, not me.
I just want to add a few words.
Not the usual professorial 50 minutes,
but just three minutes,
to what's in your program.
There are very few people in any field
who can achieve a status which is truly
that one of greatness in
the course of a lifetime
in the way that David Davis has.
After leaving his doctoral
studies at Harvard
and a short stint teaching at Dartmouth,
he began his illustrious
career at Cornell University
and has been a pioneer in
many respects in our field,
in our discipline of history,
in terms of American Studies
and relating American history
to the larger culture,
and teaching and so on,
he was one of the pioneering
professors in that field
at Cornell in terms of the shape
that intellectual history has taken.
His first book using literary
text in a unique way,
as I was reminded by a
specialist in that area today,
when 40 years ago he
helped to open up a field
which has flourished among other places,
very much at Berkeley.
He cast new light on the Reform Movement,
the movements of the 19th
century in relation to religion,
in relation to in particular anti-slavery,
and larger issues of prejudice as well as
more narrow issue of
prejudice focused on race.
And it's just a marvelous
achievement in itself
that so many fields which have
flourished in his lifetime
and in our experience in the
last 40 years in scholarship,
he has played such a role.
He has been engaged in a major enterprise
represented in his magnum
opus still in progress,
and justly celebrated with a Pulitzer
and other great prizes and appointments.
He was the Harmsworth Professor at Oxford,
and appointment of
similar status in France
and elsewhere in the
world in his teaching,
and holding many honors for it.
It's an enterprise that
has looked at the global
or multinational views of anti-slavery,
and increasingly of slavery itself.
He is recognized in (muffled
speaking) kind of stamps,
(muffled speaking)
stamps, great contribution
to the transformation of the
study of slavery from one
which was written in a
long-entrenched racist
and tradition regarding
slavery as paternalistic,
and transforming it in basic ways
which are still in
progress, into which some
very distinguished historians
in our history department here
have contributed over the years.
Today, he turns to a subject
which is deeply embedded
in this great study,
trying to give a global
and multinational view of
a subject which too often
was viewed not only as,
in benign terms, but also
strictly in terms of the
Antebellum American South,
the subject of exodus and colonization.
It's a very special pleasure
to welcome David Davis
of Yale University as
the Jefferson lecturer.
(audience applauding)
(speech drowned out by clapping)
- Well, it's an enormous
honor to give this lecture,
and I wanna give immense
thanks to Dean Duncan,
and especially to my
colleague and good friend
of over 49 years, Harry Scheiber,
for his very generous introduction.
And I'm also most grateful
for all that Ellen Gombler
has done to arrange this
event in such a cordial
as well as efficient way.
During the Haitian
Revolution from 1791 to 1804,
slaves and blacks defeated
not only their masters,
but the formidable armies of
Spain, Britain, and France.
This seismic destruction
of the richest centerpiece
of the new world slave system
demonstrated the possible fate
of every slave-holding
society in the new world.
It also coincided in time
with Britain's founding
of Sierra Leone as a refuge for slaves
mainly freed during the
American Revolution,
and with the growth of an
Anglo-American interest
in the African colonization
of their own free blacks.
I should stress that African
colonization had earlier
and independent origins, but
if Haiti's destroyed economy
symbolized one of the possible outcomes
of slave emancipation,
the emigration or removal of free blacks
represented a quite different, quote,
solution to the problem of slavery,
at least in the United States.
About the voluntary character
of this proposed migration,
there was very considerable
ambiguity and debate.
But from the American
Revolution to the Civil War,
visions of black colonization,
black colonists carrying
Christian civilization
to Africa profoundly influenced
the public controversy over emancipation.
Indeed, from Jefferson through
Lincoln, most of America's
eminent leaders insisted
that the blight of slavery
could not be overcome
unless a distant refuge
were found for the black
beneficiaries of freedom.
This premise was angrily rejected
by the majority of Northern free blacks,
who took the lead in
challenging the motives
of white colonizationists.
And after 1830, white
abolitionists increasingly made
the disavowal of colonization
the core of their convention of faith.
Many of these white abolitionists attacked
the American Colonization
Society and its colony, Liberia,
as vehemently as they
attacked slavery itself.
But despite denunciations by abolitionists
and most Southern defenders
of slavery were not interested
in colonization, the idea
of black resettlement
kept rebounding after apparent defeats.
And various black leaders, from Paul Cuffe
to Henry Highland
Garnet, Martin R. Delany,
Alexander Crummell, and
James Theodore Holly,
promoted their own projects
for an African or Caribbean homeland.
Delany, according to Ed Wilmot Blydon
a black advocate of Liberian colonization,
had the qualifications to
become, quote, the Moses
to lead in the exodus of his people
from the house of bondage
to a land flowing with milk and honey.
The essential distinction
between choosing to emigrate
and being colonized by others
has usually obscured the
fact that early speeches
and reports of the white
American Colonization Society
founded in 1816 anticipated
the central themes
and expectations of black emigrationists
from Garnet and Delany
in the era of slavery
down to Marcus Garvey,
who led the first real mass
movement of African Americans
in the 1920s in his
Back to Africa movement.
Modern historians, modern
historians have understandably
been hostile to the ACS
and its diverse supporters.
The Colonization Movement did
embody and often encouraged
the most insidious forms of white racism.
As a movement seeking white consensus,
colonization embraced a wide variety
of contradictory motives,
interests, hopes, and visions.
But the simple dichotomy
between a kind of ACS Antichrist
and the Abolitionist
Redeemers, which abolitionists
perpetuated as a way of
explaining their own journey
from spiritual blindness
to a new reformation,
can only obscure our
understanding of both movements.
Although colonizationists
have conventionally
been dismissed as hopelessly
impractical visionaries,
for example, the history
of 19th century immigration
to America shows that they
were not so unrealistic
in their estimates of
government-backed shipping capacity.
They were also clearly more
realistic than the abolitionists
when they argued that
white racial prejudice
would remain intractable
for generations to come,
and that the achievements
of a few individual blacks
would not benefit the masses,
that progress would
depend on black solidarity
and collective effort,
and that the formal act
of emancipating slaves
could not be divorced
from the need for economic
and social environments
in which the freed people
could really exercise
their full capacities
for human development.
Of course this is not
to say that the program
of the ACS was the right solution.
But if the colonization
movement actually represented
a dangerous obstacle to African
American self-fulfillment,
and I think it did, we
will never understand
or even recognize similar obstacles
if we rely on negative caricature
and fail to grasp the complexity
of the movement's appeal.
Now, at first glance, the
distinction between emigration
and expulsion seems clear-cut.
In the archetypal story
of Exodus, God enabled
the Israelites to flee
from Egyptian bondage
and undergo the trials and self-purgation
that prepared them for a life of freedom
in the Promised Land.
Although we should remember
that the desperate Pharaoh
finally ordered the
Israelites to leave Egypt
in the middle of the night.
And of course then he changed
his mind and sent an army
to capture or kill the Israelites.
Some five centuries later,
according to the Bible,
when the children of Israel
and the Northern Kingdom
sinned against, quote, the Lord their God
who had freed them from the land of Egypt,
worshiping idols, practicing
pagan rites and enchantments,
they were punished according
to the Hebrew prophets,
by an Assyrian conquest that
led to mass deportations
from Samaria and upper
Mesopotamia and Medea
where 10 of the tribes of Israelites
lost their historical identity.
And as many of you may
know, the American Indians
were seen by many as the
lost tribes of Israel.
In Christian theology, it
might be said the saved
emigrate to heaven, sinners
are deported to hell,
or perhaps a purgatory where
they gain a second chance.
On closer inspection, voluntary migrations
have seldom been free from
pain, nostalgia, and regret.
Involuntary exiles have
sometimes found a Promised Land.
Images of colonization and expulsion,
particularly since the
Protestant Reformation,
have been enriched by biblical narratives
that were known to some
degree by the lowest classes
of society, and that
reach back to the earliest
human memories of migration.
Conquest, deportation, and
longing for a lost homeland.
Psychologically I suppose such experiences
have also echoed the
stages of individual life,
from the departure from a natal family,
on through our aging and death,
and the succession of generations.
Historically, the appeal
of a new beginning
has usually been mixed with
fears of disinheritance,
of exile from the graves of ancestors,
or of becoming like the biblical Cain,
a ceaseless wanderer on Earth,
dispossessed of place and society.
The Exodus narrative, which
had been so vitally important
for the first English
colonists in North America,
and Virginia I might say,
as well as New England.
This Exodus narrative
took on poignant meaning
for African American emigrationists.
In 1820 when the first expedition sent out
by the American Colonization
Society, backed by
the U.S. government, settled at a swampy,
unhealthful spot on Sherbro
Island off the coast
of Sierra Leone, the colonists were soon
decimated by disease.
Before dying, the Society's white agent
granted his commission as a leader,
through Daniel Coker, a
mulatto minister and teacher,
who on shipboard may have
prevented a black rebellion
against white authority.
At times of crisis, Coker
had repeatedly prayed that,
quote, "He that was Moses in
the wilderness be with us,"
and that, quote, "He that
divided the waters for Israel
"will open our way, but I know not how."
By May 1821, Coker confided to his journal
that Moses was, I think, permitted to see
the Promised Land but not to enter in.
I think it likely that
I shall not be permitted
to see our expected earthly Canaan,
but this will be of small
amount, of small moment
so that some thousand of Africa's children
are safely landed.
Now, a century later, moving
on to the 20th century,
Marcus Garvey employed the same precedent
in his speech restating the goals
of his Universal Negro
Improvement Association.
And I quote Garvy, "It was
because of lack of faith
"in the children of Israel
that they were held up
"for so long in the wilderness,
and why so many of them
"died without seeing the Promised Land.
"That same lack of faith," said Garvy,
"will be the downfall of many of us."
The Exodus narrative has been central
to the Judeo-Christian idea of God shaping
the course of human history
through a succession
of warnings, promises,
punishments, and rewards.
Taken as the literal
transcription of God's revelation
to Moses, the story has been recapitulated
and transmogrified not only
in the Old and New Testaments,
but through much of Western history.
It has conveyed the astounding message,
and when one thinks of it,
it really is astounding,
that in the past, the distant past,
God actually heard the
cries of the oppressed
and was willing to free
slaves from their masters.
Indeed, God passed over the
brilliant and powerful peoples
of the ancient Near East and chose a group
of degraded slaves to bear
the awesome responsibility
of receiving and transmitting his law.
Exodus has therefore furnished a model
for every kind of deliverance,
whether by escape,
revolution, or spiritual rebirth.
It has helped people
understand the suffering,
the rebellious, quote,
murmuring, as the Bible has it,
and the moral testing that marked the road
toward the Promised Land.
Although Christian theologians
generally interpreted
the Mosaic Exodus as a
prefiguration of Christ's redemption
of humankind, numerous
Christian groups have identified
their own sins, afflictions,
rewards, and mission
with those of ancient Israel.
Such views of similitude
have ranged from momentary
and casual analogies, on the one hand,
to a sustained sense
of actually re-enacting
the sacred history.
There's no need here to
consider the convolusions
of Protestant covenant theology,
but it's sufficient to note
that by the late 16th
century, English preachers
thought it self-evident
that God had chosen England
for special blessings and responsibilities
because as numerous sermons put it,
we are like unto the children of Israel.
The Israelite paradigm, by
affirming the continuity
of sacred history, and the
consistency of God's judgment
of nations, enabled preachers to draw upon
the matchless eloquence
of the Hebrew prophets
as they condemned the sins of the land.
This evolving Jeremiad,
as it's been called,
named after the Prophet
Jeremiah, created a framework
for interpreting both the
Puritan exodus to America
and the English civil
wars of the 17th century.
The Israelite paradigm became so embedded
in Anglo-American Protestant culture
that such diverse groups as the English
and American Puritans, clerical supporters
of the American Revolution, the Mormons,
and black immigrants and
so-called exodusters,
pictured themselves as
being delivered from Egypt.
American colonizationists
were hardly eager,
as you can imagine, to identify the U.S.
with Iran and Egypt, or
to associate their cause
with the notorious expulsions
of European history.
When Thomas Jefferson wrote,
quote, that we should look
in vain for an example in
the Spanish deportation
or deletion of the Moors,
he seems to have meant
that compared to Spain,
Virginia would reap
far richer benefits and
escape far worse calamities
by beginning while, and I quote Jefferson,
"It is still in our power
to direct the process
"of emancipation and deportation peaceably
"and in such slow degree as that the evil
"will wear off insensibly."
I might just add as a
footnote that in 1824
in a letter, Jefferson proposed
that 60,000 slaves may be freed,
or free blacks be deported every year
for 25 years, and that this
would more than counterbalance
the natural increase of
the white population.
In 1832, a fellow Virginian,
an ardent colonizationist,
Jesse Burton Harrison,
stressed that, quote,
the very last cases to
which we would compare
such gradual withdrawal
would be the expulsion
of the 800,000 Jews from Spain
under Ferdinand and Isabella,
or the nearly million of
Moors under Philip III,
or that of the Huguenots, and I'll use
the English pronunciation, from France.
I should say parenthetically
that I think the best
modern estimates are that
the number of Jews expelled
in 1492 from Spain was something
in the vicinity of 150,000.
Not as Harrison said, 800,000.
But there were at least 275,000
Moors and Moriscos expelled later.
The difference, according to Harrison
and other colonizationists,
had little to do with consent,
since Harrison, like
Jefferson, spoke frankly
of the deportation, and used
that word, of freed slaves.
Contrary to the official rhetoric
of the Colonization
Society, which never used
the word deportation,
they tried to at least
give the impression
this would be voluntary.
The difference lay in the avoidance
of sudden disruptive change
and in the alleged
worthlessness to Virginia
of any black population.
In contrast to America's
blacks, Harrison affirmed
that the Jews, the Moors,
and the Huguenots, quote,
"Carried with them greater personal wealth
"in proportion to their
number, finer skills,
"and more thriving habits
than were left behind them."
The movement through
Colonize America's Blacks
can be put in clearer
perspective if we examine
some of the precedents,
or anti-precedents,
that were at least vaguely familiar
to late 18th century and
19th century Americans.
These historical examples
should help us understand
the ways in which the
colonization movement
combined some of the
features of deportation
with an idealized picture of
17th century English migrations
to Virginia and New England.
Any expulsion or exodus
is bound to be seen
in a wholly different light
by the world's pharaohs, on the one hand,
and the Israelites on the other.
Like the biblical Pharaoh,
and like America's
post-revolutionary whites, the persecutors
have typically voiced
alarm over the sudden,
said the supposedly sudden
growth of a population
of dangerous strangers or heretics.
And the Bible itself
talks about the Pharaoh
and the Egyptians being
alarmed by the rapid growth
of the Jews, and this
was very true of whites
in early 19th century
America, including Jefferson.
Yet the desire to expel or
exterminate these unwanted
subversives has been
restrained at least temporarily
by a realistic knowledge
of their services.
In Medieval Europe, for
example, the church's obsession
with religious uniformity
was often counterbalanced
by a secular recognition
that Jews could be
extremely useful to the state
because of their knowledge
of commerce, credit,
and banking, medicine,
and the languages and
customs of distant Christian
and even Muslim lands.
In 13th century England, the crown derived
a significant share of its revenue
from a few extraordinarily
wealthy Jewish magnates.
It was not until Henry III's ruinous taxes
that had impoverished the
Anglo-Jewish community
that the way was open for
the famous expulsion edict,
expelling the Jews from England in 1290.
Two centuries later when
Spain deported a far larger
Jewish population, I said
apparently around 150,000,
officials tried to keep
some of the irreplaceable
Jewish physicians from
leaving the country.
At the turn of the 17th century,
proposals to exterminate
or expel Spain's Moriscos,
who were converted Moors,
Moors converted to Christianity,
were resisted by landlords
and creditors who relied on their labor.
Such self-interested
resistance could be overcome
by a belief in two kinds of danger.
First, the fear that
the subject population
would rise in armed
revolt like the Haitians,
or aid neighboring enemies.
And secondly, the fear
that an unassimilated group
would corrupt the purity of a
religious or national mission.
Often these two fears
overlapped, as in the prophecies
of Jefferson and other white leaders
that the continuing
presence of America's blacks
would either undermine the experiment
in republican government or
provoke what Jefferson called,
quote, the exterminating
thunder of a God of justice,
who in an armed struggle,
Jefferson admitted,
would favor the oppressed.
And he actually wrote
that in notes in Virginia
more than five years before
the Haitian Revolution.
Internal security served
as a pretext at least
for the expulsion of some 275,000 Moriscos
from early modern Spain.
Centuries of Christian reconquest
had led to the subjugation
of a very large Muslim population.
And they were often
indispensable to the economy,
but they also rebelled
and often collaborated
with enemy Muslim armies,
attacking the coasts of Spain.
In the 13th and 14th
centuries, Spanish Christians
enslaved and massacred the Moors,
but they also intermarried with them.
Christian kings prohibited
Moors from emigrating
to Muslim lands, but also
expelled them as security risks.
This dilemma persisted long
after the conquest of Granada,
which purged Spain finally of
all Muslim leaders or rulers.
The Spanish Moriscos,
while nominally Christian,
rebelled in the late 1560s when the crown
tried to eradicate their
Moorish customs and culture.
Envied for their industry and fecundity,
the Moriscos were perceived
as internal enemies
who might support the
Turkish attacks on Spain.
This was a time when Turkey,
Ottoman Turkey was expanding.
Philip III's decree of 1609,
finally ordering the Moriscos
to leave Spain, won
enthusiastic popular support
at the very moment when
Spaniards felt humiliated
by concessions to the victorious Dutch.
The decree was also
hailed as an act of mercy
to a population which many Spaniards
thought deserved extermination.
Unlike the Moors and the
Moriscos, the Spanish Jews
had no potential allies or
traditions of armed rebellion.
Although Christians repeated
and embellished all the libels
fabricated during the centuries
of anti-Semitic persecution,
the famous Edict of Expulsion of 1492
focused on the dilemma of assimilation,
a dilemma experienced in different form
by 19th century free blacks
who sought acceptance
in the United States.
Following the anti-Semitic
riots and massacres of 1391,
many Spanish Jews
converted to Christianity
to prove the authenticity
of their own faith.
Unfortunately, a few of
these so-called Marranos,
or new Christians,
accused others of secret
Judaizing practices,
circumcision or observing
the Jewish Sabbath.
Using torture, the Inquisition
extracted a sufficient number
of conventions to cast doubt on anyone
with a trace of Jewish ancestry.
The Spanish preoccupation
with purity of blood,
limpieza de sangre, merged
racism with religious prejudice.
In theory, the Marranos,
and the word by the way
meant swine, were not
denied the possibility,
or they were not denied the possibility
of Christian redemption.
In actuality, they could always be accused
of Judaizing practices and be banished
or burned at the stake.
By 1492, when the Reconquista
finally subjected Granada
to Christian rule, Ferdinand
and Isabella concluded
that the Marranos and their descendants
could simply never be free from corruption
so long as real Jews were
allowed to live in Spain
where they could secretly
instruct the new Christians
and persuade them, quote,
to follow the law of Moses.
Now, here one's reminded of the fear
expressed by many Southern slaveholders
that slaves would never
unquestioningly accept their status
as long as free blacks
could poison their minds
and represent the possibility
of a different way of life.
Because Ferdinand and Isabella
were determined to prevent,
quote, our Holy Catholic
faith from being debased
and humbled, they ordered all Jews
to leave Spain within four months.
This of course coincides
with Columbus's departure from Palos.
Indeed when he started his
voyage, there were ships loading,
being loaded with Jews in the same port.
Even such classic examples of expulsion
usually implied a degree
of individual choice
and self-definition.
Thousands, as I've implied,
thousands of Spanish Jews,
including prominent rabbis,
accepted last-minute conversion
to Christianity as a lesser of evils.
Two centuries later,
thousands of French Huguenots
preferred Catholicism to exile or death.
The French Acadians whom
the British deported
in 1755, 1756 from Nova Scotia
and adjacent territories
could probably have remained
in their Canadian
homeland had they accepted
an unconditional oath of
allegiance to the British crown
that would've denied in effect
any political authority of the Pope.
These were, Acadians
were of course Catholic.
Some 70,000 American
loyalists, the first refugees
from a modern secular
revolution, also rejected
the alternative of a loyalty
oath or political conversion.
It's interesting to note
that none of these exiles,
with the arguable exception
of several thousand
black American loyalists,
faced the really impossible
requirement of changing the
color of his or her skin.
Yet for many Spanish Jews,
Huguenots, or other religious
or political refugees,
the choice of conversion
was really equivalent to enslavement.
The alternatives were
roughly comparable to those
offered to a small group
of Southern bondsmen
who were given the choice by their masters
of emigrating to Liberia as free people
or remaining in America as slaves.
And I might tell you as a footnote,
I remember one of the
earliest 18th-century
anti-slavery tracts I found, I think 1714,
attacked slavery without
restraint, but then says of course
if the slaves would be
freed, they'd have to leave
the English colonies.
So there were slaves who had that choice,
Liberia or remain a slave.
The meaning of consent
is also transformed by,
obviously by violent persecution,
which can sometimes bring the
oppressors and the oppressed
to agree that any further
coexistence is impossible,
especially when the
oppressed are perceived
and begin to perceive
themselves as a separate nation.
Despite their humiliation and suffering,
exiles and refugees have
often found it difficult
to view their rejection as permanent.
Groups of Spanish Jews,
Huguenots, and Acadians,
and other expatriates
addressed kings with petitions
or monetary offers in the hope of securing
a right to return.
Moriscos who retain christian practice
and who found themselves
despised in Barbary
slipped back into Spain at
the risk of being discovered
and condemned for the
galleys as galley slaves.
Hundreds of Acadians
who had been dispersed
among the Franco-phobic and anti-Catholic
American colonists in
what became the U.S.,
to the South, they welcomed
the open boats and supplies
provided by the governments
of Georgia and South Carolina,
and these Acadians sailed in small boats
up the Atlantic coast
in desperate attempts
to reach the Bay of Fundy.
For at least two generations
after the revocation
in France of the Edict
of Noth, many Huguenots
awaited the providential event
that would enable them to return to France
and convert their
countrymen to Protestantism.
Although some groups of
refugees such as the Huguenots
soon lost their distinctive
identity, and the Huguenots
were at least welcomed by
many Protestant nations
adjacent or near France.
Victims of persecution were no less bound
than other immigrants to the culture
of their former homelands.
In Northern Africa, Italy,
Flanders, and Turkey,
for example, Sephardic Jews
continued to take great pride
in their Spanish language,
in their Spanish manners
and customs, and this gave them
an air of cosmopolitan superiority.
When America's black refugees
returned to the United States
from Haiti, Canada, or Liberia,
or preserved American customs
and institutions abroad,
and we'll get to that in a few moments,
they were not there by
betraying their distinctive
African American subculture or diluting
their resentment towards
racist oppression.
Historical comparisons
also provide perspective
on the mixture of exuberance and despair
felt by many exiles as
they sought to explain
their loss of homes,
property, and community,
as well as the frightening
uncertainty of the future.
For faithful Muslims,
Jews, and Christians alike,
such cataclysms could be comprehended
only as the acts of God, the will of God.
So the deported Moriscos
arrived at the Spanish port
of Alicante, quote, with music and song,
as though going to a
festival, and thanking Allah
for the happiness of returning
to the land of their fathers.
Although many Moriscos mistrusted
King Philip III's offer
of free transport, and thus
chartered their own ships,
others interpreted Spain's
sudden reversal of policy
as a providential opportunity.
As one leader put it,
quote, "To go to the land
"of our ancestors under our king the Turk
"who will let us live as
Moors and not as slaves,
"as we have been treated
by our Christian masters."
In 1492, many Jews expressed
a similar sense of exultation
and even ecstasy as they
compared their suffering
and banishment to the Mosaic Exodus,
or saw it as a third exile,
confirming their unique
relationship with God.
It was even said that
this exodus from Spain
would be followed,
quote, by a Promised Land
of glory and honor.
Others added that it would
not be long before Spain
recalled her children, so certain exiles,
after selling their
property, buried their money
in the soil of the mother
country, that is, in Spain.
These Jews before departing buried gold,
buried money, they thought they'd return.
After receiving a warm welcome in Turkey,
one Jewish poet proclaimed
that God had at last
provided a safe asylum in
which Jews could cast off
corruptions and recover ancient truths.
So you have the sort
of double contradictory
sense of behavior here, of
welcoming that the new land,
but also having nostalgia for the old
to which they would someday return.
Some Huguenot leaders
compared their persecution
to that of the Spanish
and Portuguese Jews.
They also complained that
their followers, quote,
like the Israelites no
sooner passed the sea,
that they forget their
deliverance and go astray.
For Huguenot exiles,
however, the central meaning
of the Israelites' exodus was
that God would not abandon
the faithful who remained
within his covenant.
The punishment he had
inflicted upon such persecutors
as the Pharaoh and Herod in
the Old and New Testaments
showed that Catholic
tyrants would inevitably
pay for their crimes.
The agony that's suffered
by the Protestants
within France would soon cease.
Well, Protestant Huguenot
leaders, like Pierre Jurieu,
recommended emigration to America as a way
of escaping conversion to Catholicism.
They associated
deliverance with the return
to a purified France,
not a new Promised Land.
Still, I think it's
noteworthy that a woman
named Mademoiselle de Serre
wrote to her mother and father,
a Huguenot pastor, while
sailing to America in 1688.
And she compared the way God
had delivered the Israelites
from the hands of Pharaoh
to the way he had enabled
her faithful compatriots to
escape their persecutors.
And as she put it
joyfully, crossed the sea.
Now, ironically, Mademoiselle de Serre
was bound for Saint-Domingue,
or what would become Haiti.
She could not foresee the chain of events
that would lead to the
expulsion of whites in the 1790s
or that would arouse hopes similar to hers
136 years later among
shiploads of thousands
of American free blacks
bound for the same island.
In 1824 especially, there
were thousands of free blacks
in Philadelphia and New
York who were very much
attracted by President Pierre Borghese,
the president of Haiti's
offer to subsidize
their immigration into Haiti.
While exiles and refugees
recalled the biblical exodus,
they seldom referred to its darker side.
When the founders and supporters
of the American Colonization
Society asserted
that this scheme is from God,
and that to labor in this work
is to co-work with God, they
envisioned the salvation
of Africa, not the
slaughter or displacement
of its African natives.
When Edward Wilmot Blyden
wrote to his fellow
African Americans from
Liberia telling them
that God had mandated their
return to an African homeland,
he quoted from Deuteronomy,
quote, "Behold, the Lord thy God
"hath set the land before thee.
"Go up and possess it as
the Lord God of thy fathers
"have said unto thee, fear
not, neither be discouraged."
But Blyden did not point
out that this passage
I've just quoted precedes
God's angry complaint
that the Israelites had been fearful
of trying to conquer,
quote, a people stronger
and taller than we, large
cities with walls sky high.
In Deuteronomy, at the end
of the 40 years preparation
in the wilderness, the
Lord informs the Israelites
that they are about to
invade and occupy, quote,
seven nations much larger than you.
The Promised Land is not an empty land.
He promises, quote, that he
will dislodge these people
before you, little by little.
You will not be able to
put an end to them at once
else the wild beast would
multiply to your herd.
After guaranteeing victory
over the idolatrous nations
that occupied the
Promised Land, God issues
an unequivocal command, quote,
"You shall not let a soul remain alive."
And when Joshua's troops
eventually captured Jericho,
the Bible reports they
exterminated everything
in the city with a sword, men and women,
young and old, ox and sheep and ass.
Now in actuality, archaeological
evidence indicates
that the Israelites slowly
infiltrated the land of Canaan,
and certainly did not
exterminate their enemies.
God's war sermon calling for
really killing off all the people
probably reflects a post-settlement lament
that the Israelites' adoption
of idolatrous customs
and intermarriage with Canaanites
could've been prevented
by killing off all the native inhabitants.
Talmudic and Medieval
rabbinic commentators
insisted that God's ruthless commandment
could never, ever serve as a precedent
for other times and other peoples.
Even the New England currents,
who sometimes referred
to the Indians as
Canaanites and Amalekites,
were extremely reluctant to
invoke God's commandments
to annihilate specific pagan tribes.
Nevertheless, the conquest of Canaan
provided an example of divinely
sanctioned colonization
and violent displacement,
which was not lost on the
English colonists in Ireland
coming down to Cromwell's
infamous invasion,
and of course the
colonists of North America.
And the colonizing blacks,
unlike the Native Americans,
were portrayed as latter-day pilgrims
who would carry to Africa
the seeds of Christianity
and American civilization.
Frequently likened to
the founders of Plymouth
and Jamestown, the black
settlers in Liberia
occupied their own Canaan and
confronted their own natives
whose population had not
been depleted in advance
by alien diseases such
as those that wiped out
whole communities of Eastern Indians
before Plymouth was settled.
Now, moving ahead a moment,
in 1924 W.E.B. Du Bois
proclaimed from Liberia that Africa
is the spiritual frontier of humankind.
Oh, the wild and beautiful
adventures of its taming.
He described Monrovia as
a city set upon a hill.
This actually comes from
the Sermon on the Mount.
People always say John
Winthrop, but John Winthrop
took the city on the
hill image from Jesus.
And this of course had
been a central symbol
of New England's mission to the world.
In 1924 Du Bois' ideal
of a tropical paradise
was really the opposite, the antipode
of Winthrop's ideal of a disciplined,
enterprising Christian Commonwealth,
an ideal accepted in large measure
by the 19th century black and
white founders of Liberia.
A native New Englander,
and the first black to earn
a PhD from Harvard, Du Bois
had long been fascinated
by the African roots of,
quote, what he called
American Negro culture.
Late in 1923, he'd been sent to Liberia
as President Coolidge's Envoy
and Minister Plenipotentiary
for the inauguration of
President C.D.B. King.
After walking for hours in the bush
and visiting a crew village,
Du Bois made the romantic
discovery that efficiency
and happiness do not go
together in modern culture.
He said laziness divine eternal langer
is right and good and true.
Now, even as he rebelled
against the compulsions
of his own internalized work
ethic, Du Bois's allusion
to the mud town Plymouth Rock
and the city set upon a hill,
where he enforced the central
hope of Liberia's history,
namely that African Americans,
having been cruelly
excluded from the promise
of American life, which
they had helped create,
could find fulfillment and dignity
in a regenerated America
on the shores of Africa.
Du Bois's rhapsodic
response to African culture
illustrates the complexity of
modeling African colonization
on the myth of America as a Promised Land.
Unlike Du Bois, Liberia's
19th century black settlers
had not studied anthropology.
They failed to share his poetic
delight in what he praised
as the ancient witchery
of Africa's medicine
and his appreciation of
the villagers', quote,
leisure of true aristocracy,
leisure for thought
and courtesy, leisure
for sleep and laughter.
With a few exceptions,
the Americo-Liberians
were no less ethnocentric
than the white settlers of North America.
They too thought to
escape in Egypt or Babylon
and build the city on
the hill, that would reap
the full material and spiritual rewards
of Christian civilization.
They too experienced
uncertainty and homelessness,
or homesickness as they struggled to find
a new identity that would
help deliberate their brethren
from the oppressions of history.
Like the Puritans, the Liberian
settlers and their patrons
were alert to the dangers
of what we might call
counter-conversion, that is of colonists
assuming the ways of Canaan.
Ralph Randolph Gurley,
and Connecticut born
and Yale educated secretary,
and Vice President of the ACS,
warned that without the means
of Christian improvement,
the Americo-Liberians would
quickly become indistinguishable
from the African natives, quote,
except by the sturdiness
and variety of their vices.
The location and very
meaning of a Promised Land
were complicated by the
need to conquer Canaan
while looking backwards across the sea
for standards of justification
and moral assessment.
Would New England or Liberia
redeem their flawed progenitors
or become dissolute clearings
in a distant wilderness?
Among the world's emigrants and colonists,
the Puritans and Quakers were exceptional
in their relative affluence, education,
and political experience.
And this point was
frequently noted by black,
free black critics of the ACS
who objected to the apparent absurdity
of expecting similar
feats of nation-building
from illiterate former slaves.
Although English Puritans
were despised and persecuted
by their high church countrymen,
their so-called errand into the wilderness
was not governed and interpreted
by a Puritan colonization society
that regarded them as,
quote, vile excrescence,
or a foul stain upon the nation.
These epithets were pervasive
among white supporters
of black colonization.
And of course they'd been
applied to Jews, Moriscos,
convicts, and other
victims of deportation.
But the voluntary immigrants
to Liberia found themselves
in a bizarre an unprecedented position.
They were assigned the
mission of saving America
by vindicating their race
and civilizing Africa.
As President John Tyler, an
ardent supporter of slavery
put it, Monrovia will be to Africa
what Jamestown and Plymouth
have been to America.
Yet they themselves
were the very corruption
whose purgation would supposedly
purify the United States.
Nevertheless, the more
articulate white supporters
of African colonization,
especially the religious activists,
viewed their own errand as
a providential opportunity
to cleanse the U.S. of
slavery and racial conflict,
the twin diseases that imperiled America's
Christian and republican mission.
The official journal
of the ACS even claimed
that colonizationist activity
was rapidly dispelling
white racial prejudice, since,
and I quote, it is impossible
in the nature of things
that unkind feelings or
prejudice towards a people
can long survive benevolent
efforts for their improvement.
But now you see in effect the ACS leaders
are saying that these
blacks who go to Africa
can become equal to whites.
They can overcome prejudice
and their supposed
inferiority as a result of the prejudice.
And yet they're also claiming
that we have to get rid
of the blacks because they never can
realize full human development.
But benevolent actions in
other words would purify
the more negative motives and emotions
that might have brought
support for these very actions.
Spokesmen for the ACS, including
some Southern slaveholders,
confidently predicted that American blacks
would prove their
capability for civilization
and vindicate their race
as soon as they were freed
from the degrading and
demoralizing effects
of racial prejudice.
Despite the accusations
made by abolitionists,
the speeches and publications
of colonizationists
very rarely implied that
blacks were innately
or permanently inferior to whites.
According to Robert Goodloe
Harper, the aristocratic
Maryland lawyer and politician
who actually gave Liberia
its name, the blacks who
were hopelessly debased
in the U.S. by the
stigma of racial slavery,
would be wholly transformed
within an environment
of dignity and equality.
Quote, they would become
proprietors of land,
master mechanics, ship owners, navigators,
and merchants, and by
degrees, schoolmasters,
justices of the peace, militia officers,
ministers of religion,
judges, and legislators.
Once they were removed from
the social and psychological
oppression of whites, Harper
affirmed America's blacks
would soon become equal
to the people of Europe
or of European origin so long
their masters and oppressors.
George Washington Custis, the grandson
of the first president,
contrasted the bloodshed
of the Spanish conquest of America
with the redemptive role America
would soon play in Africa.
He said future generations
of Africans, quote,
will not think of Cortez or Pizarro.
The name of America will
be hailed with enthusiasm
by millions on that vast
continent that are now unborn.
According to many bombastic
colonizationist orations,
the ultimate fate of
millions of American slaves,
and by implication America's
republican institutions,
would depend on the
black colonists' success
in civilizing Africa, in
eradicating the slave trade,
and building a free and prosperous society
that would be as attractive
to American blacks
as the United States proved
to be for European immigrants.
Liberia's mission was so
abstract, so grandiose
that it almost precluded
serious discussion
of capital investment,
technological assistance,
labor skills, and markets.
Still, some former
slaves, like John Kizell,
who had been freed by the
British and had settled
in Sierra Leone, reassured
fellow black Americans
that they were being
offered an opportunity
to return to their ancestral homeland
and had nothing to fear
regarding native Africans.
Unlike the Europeans
who colonized America,
blacks were not aliens in Africa
and faced nothing like the centuries
of Indian warfare in North America.
"Brethren," Kizell exclaimed,
"you know the land of Canaan
"was given to Abraham and to his seed.
"So Africa was given to our forefathers
"and to their children."
Like the biblical Joseph,
Africans had been sold
wrongfully into a strange land.
"It is God," Kizell
reassured African Americans,
"who has put it into the
hearts of these good men
"to assist you back to your country."
Well, the colonization society
happily endorsed this analogy
and added a crucial second argument.
Missionaries had found that
the, quote, native tribes
in the Sierra Leone region
were supposedly eager
to welcome an American colony.
The Africans were, quote, more
mild, amiable, and docile,
less warlike than the
Aborigines in America.
Reports from Sierra
Leone proved that, quote,
instead of the war-whoop of the savages,
armed with the implements
of death and torture,
they go to meet their
friends and brothers,
a generous, humane, hospitable
race, who already welcome
their approach as the
harbinger of civilization
and social happiness.
If the American settlers
took as their model
the gentleness,
forbearance, and moderation
of the Quaker founders of Pennsylvania,
they could be assured the same rewards
of uninterrupted peace
and friendly intercourse
with the Aborigines.
In 1834, Philadelphia and
New York colonizationists
actually founded a settlement in Liberia
based on Quaker principles
of pacifism and anti-slavery.
And the next year, King Joe
Harris and his crew warriors
wiped out this Bassa Cove
community in a midnight attack,
killing 20 of the colonists,
while the survivors
fled in panic through
the forests to Monrovia.
The response from the
settlers, "Liberia Herald,"
their newspaper, was predictable.
Quote, "Such as the dastardly
unprincipled disposition
"of these half cannibals
that nothing but a knowledge
"of superiority in point
of physical forests
"on the part of foreigners will keep them
"to the terms of any
compact made with them."
Actually, before long,
Americo-Liberian clergymen
were reported to be saying,
quote, "The best way
"to civilize these natives
is with powder and ball."
Neither the British nor the
Americans had learned much
from the disastrous mistakes
of New World colonization.
Apart from choosing unhealthful
sites that guaranteed
devastating mortality from disease,
they failed to comprehend
that non-Europeans
would not willingly accept
Western ideas of land use,
private property, and political authority.
Christian humanitarians, eager
to replace the slave trade
with legitimate commerce,
never anticipated
that increasing exports
of camwood, rice, ivory,
palm oil, and hides would
simply increase the demand
for slave labor in
domestic African economies.
The power of West African
political regimes and alliances
hinged on the control of trade routes
as well as on access to Western firearms,
textiles, rum, tobacco, and
iron tools and utensils.
For centuries the diverse
ethnic groups of Upper Guinea
and the Green Coast had
preserved their sovereignty
while conducting business
with European traders.
The Anglo-American
humanitarians could not see
that they were in effect
building an entrance ramp,
if I can use that, an entrance ramp
on the road to imperialism.
The free blacks and mulattoes
who first emigrated to Liberia
were dependent on the
coastal peoples for food,
trade, and knowledge of the environment.
The Dei and other coastal
groups called these black
and mulatto settlers
Americans, and even white men.
Though cautiously willing
to profit from the methods
of the non-African world,
the Africans often looked
with contempt upon former
slaves or descendants of slaves.
For their part, the settlers
felt infinitely superior
to these semi-naked heathen
who had no understanding
of private land ownership,
who believed in trial
by an ordeal of poison, and who enslaved
and sold their neighbors.
Like numerous other groups
of exiles and refugees,
the Americo-Liberians
attempted to replicate
the culture they and their
forbearers had syncretized
in their recent homeland in America.
The more privileged
settlers relished imported
American foodstuffs, and
they disdained local staples
such as cassava, plantain, and palm oil.
Moreover, in the sultry heat,
they wore black toppers,
long frock coats, and heavy silk gowns.
Amid the riotous vegetation
and under the pitiless
African sun that later
enraptured W.E.B. Du Bois,
they constructed the churches, lyceums,
benevolent societies, schools, poorhouses,
and fraternal orders
of jacksonian America.
Ironically, in cities like Philadelphia,
it had been precisely
such institution building
that had most enraged American whites
who had wanted to keep blacks
in their so-called place.
In light of the Liberian context,
one may note a still further irony.
In the U.S., blacks had
honored these institutions
with the proud adjective African.
So they were African schools
or African poorhouses and so on.
But now they're in Africa,
it's a rather different situation.
Well, how did these
developments culminating
in the early 1920s with Marcus Garvey,
whose Back to Africa
sermons led to the first
mass movement in African American history,
how do they affect our evaluation
of the colonization movement?
No doubt, early
colonizationists of both races
would feel vindicated if we allowed them
a selective glimpse of the
past century and a half
of American history.
I'm thinking of a panorama
that would include
the fratricidal Civil
War, the crushed hopes
of reconstruction, the
lynching between 1889 and 1946
of nearly 4,000 individual blacks,
the growth of festering urban ghettos,
the persistence of white
racism and black deprivation,
the report then in 1980,
a half century after
the predicted termination
of the most gradual
immigration plans, that
in 1980 blacks constituted
12% of the nation's population,
but 45% of the inmates of
state and federal prisons,
that in family income, blacks
ranked 13th out of 14th
of American ethnic
groups, earning on average
60% of the income of
whites, 50% of the income
of Asian, Indians, and
only 46% of the income
of Japanese Americans.
Despite some improvement in
the past quarter century,
the comparative statistics are, I'm sure
you would agree, still appalling.
But with respect to the
intractability of prejudice
and racial conflict, the
colonizationists were clearly
better prognosticators
than the abolitionists.
Edward Blyden and Marcus
Garvey acknowledged this point.
In fact, the white Garrisonians
would have been dumbfounded
if they had heard Garvey's
speeches and sermons
praising their colonizationist enemies.
That is, Garvey again and again praised
the white colonizationists
of the earlier 19th century.
On the other hand, one can
hardly imagine the shock
that white and black
colonizationists would experience
if they could have
viewed the recent history
of Liberia, Haiti, and Sierra Leone.
The glaring defect in the
colonizationist ideology
I think was the refusal to
recognize the vital contributions
that blacks had made and
would continue to make
to American civilization.
Even the best intention, white
reformers and missionaries
remain obstinately blind to the fact
that from the very beginnings
of American history,
the lives of blacks and
whites had been intertwined
on the most complex social, cultural,
economic, and psychological levels.
America, that mythic amalgam
of hope, abstract principles,
and mission has been
as much black as white.
Yet for some blacks, the moral
sublimity of the Puritans,
as Garnet put it, could best be recovered
by black pioneers in Africa.
This reasoning brings
me at last to the true
and insidious meaning of the
white colonization movement,
which was never dependent
really on the number of blacks
shipped off to Liberia, a small number.
It was sufficient for them
to use philanthropic language
to expatriate an entire race,
to wall blacks off as an extraneous
and dangerous presence
that someday, somehow
would disappear and no
longer affront white vision.
Psychologically and
ritualistically, the ACS, quote,
deported blacks while
affirming their capacity
to flourish in a distant tropical climate.
This strategy, which has
simply assumed new forms
in recent decades, is deceptive precisely
because it is seldom cynical
and has usually been combined
with genuine goodwill.
For example, in his annual
message to Congress in 1862,
Lincoln described his unsuccessful efforts
to find sites for voluntary
black colonization
in which emigrants would
be protected, quote,
in all the rights of free
men and ensured conditions,
Lincoln said, which shall
be equal, just, and humane.
Lincoln added that Liberia and Haiti
are the only countries to which colonists
of African descent from here could go
with certainty of being received
and adopted as citizens.
Unfortunately, the president
added, few of the blacks
contemplating emigration
were willing to go
to either Liberia or Haiti.
For Lincoln, a man of
goodwill who thought he knew
the blacks' best interest,
the problem seemed,
in 1862, insoluble.
As the war progressed, however,
Lincoln soon abandoned colonization
and saw the necessity of
combining racial coexistence
with equal protection of the law.
Two months before Lincoln was killed,
William Henry Channing,
the abolitionist chaplain
of the House of Representatives,
invited Henry Highland
Garnet to deliver a sermon
to the Congress commemorating
the recent passage
of the 13th Amendment.
Garnet, who had been born a slave,
and who had in 1843, even
exhorted America's slaves
to rebel, Garnet, who
had temporarily emigrated
as an expatriate to
Jamaica, and had then become
an ardent supporter of the Union cause,
identifying Lincoln with
the biblical Joshua,
was the first black ever
to address Congress.
After depicting slavery, quote,
as the concentrated essence
of all conceivable
wickedness, snatching man
from the high place to which he was lifted
by the hand of God, and dragging him down
to the level of the brute
creation, the companion
of the horse, the fellow of the ox,
Garnet interpreted the war
as Lincoln himself had done,
as a divinely inflicted punishment
and as a warning that the nation's fate,
a warning of the nation's
fate if it failed to atone
for its injustice and
fulfill its high principles.
But what is most striking
in view of the themes
of this lecture is Garnet's
powerful transfiguration
of the Exodus trope.
The nation, Garnet said, the
nation has begun its exodus
from worse than Egyptian bondage.
And I beseech you to say to the people
that they go forward.
In other words, it was not only the slaves
or the African Americans who stood in need
of deliverance from Egyptian bondage.
In the United States, whites themselves,
Garnet was saying, were
yoked to the blacks
they had enslaved.
The nation as a whole
modeled on ancient dreams
of deliverance and fulfillment
could march no further forward
than all the victims of its self-betrayal.
I thank you, many thanks.
(audience applauding)
- Thank you, Professor Davis,
that was a marvelously
sweeping and erudite
and challenging talk.
As a person interested in legal history,
I could ask quite a few questions myself,
but I'll forbear.
He's kindly consented
to about five minutes,
given our compressed time here.
There will be a reception afterward
in which there'll be time
for informal interchange,
but are there any
questions from the floor?
Very brief, no speeches, just questions.
It would be very welcome.
Yes, please?
- [Kenneth] Yes, good
evening, Professor Davis.
Welcome to the University of California.
My name is Kenneth Cooper, I'm
with the UC Berkeley campus.
You mentioned something
striking the beginning
of your lecture, you
talked about Jefferson
adding the proposal to
deliver 6,000 slaves
to freedom and the 25-year plan.
Why did that fail, and
what was going on there?
- The question was my remark
that Jefferson had proposed
the freeing and deportation
of 60,000 blacks
every year, and for 25 years.
This was when he was quite old.
It's in 1824, two years before he died.
So he's 81, and it's in a letter,
a private letter that he suggests this.
All along though he had, at various times,
I don't have time to read, a much earlier,
a passage from Jefferson where he talks
about the great importance of a very slow,
almost imperceptible change as slavery
is gradually done away with
and blacks are gradually removed to,
he was doubtful about Africa,
but removed to some other place.
There was earlier talk about some place
in the West and so on.
But this was in just in a
private letter that he made this.
And it would've meant that he,
by my figuring, he's thinking
about a million slaves
in a period of 25 years.
And at that time, I think in 1824,
there was something over a million,
I think by 1830 there were
over two million slaves.
Certainly there were four million by 1860,
or almost four million.
Let me--
(audience applauding)
If I have, since this is actually
a very interesting question,
that well, I know I was just going to say
that this is a letter he
wrote to Jared Sparks in 1824.
And he referred to this as
the whole annual increase
for a period of 25 years
with 60,000 a year.
I just wanted to check
to see if it was right.
Okay, I'd be glad to talk
with people individually.
(audience applauding)
(chiming music)
