Dr. Joseph Windham talks to students and fellow professors about the historical stereotypes of black abolitionists.

During the summer of 2009, Dr. Joseph Windham, Professor of History at the Alexandria campus, attended a Yale University seminar, Passages to Freedom: Abolition and the Underground Railroad. The course was taught by Professors James and Lois Horton, graduates of George Washington University and George Mason University. The seminar series offered at The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History was designed to help teachers bring new life into teaching history. On Wednesday, Feb. 18, Windham led a lecture in the Bisdorf Building, sharing what he learned with NOVA students.

The Abolition Movement in the United States was one of the most intricate, successful grass roots movements in history. Over time, the profile of the individual abolitionist has been fictionalized by stereotypes such as being defined as that of religious pious and zealots. In reality, the movement was comprised of mostly working class, some middle class, and few upper class people. Politicians, milk men, Quakers, slaves, and African seamen all participated.

Abolition began with the slaves. “Slaves saw themselves as human beings. Something maintained that in their condition that made them resist,” Windham addressed his audience. The difference between anti-slave beliefs and abolitionists was that abolitionists put their belief into action. Slavery was the law of the land, and every man, woman and child had to enforce that law at the peril of their livelihood and freedom. The law penalized subverters with incarceration, property seizure, and death. Furthermore, if a runaway slave crossed paths with and went unnoticed by a white person, that white person could be imprisoned for it.

From the beginning, Africans were outnumbered, out-armed and faced disease caused by the wretched conditions of capture. These Africans were captured by rival clans and merchants in the interior of the continent then brought to the shores where most of the prepping and  sales actually took place. Suffering from abuse and physical trauma, the captured men and women faced a future of indefinite ownership and torture strengthened by their cultural memory, heritage, religion, and faith that things would get better one day.

Many slaves could communicate amongst themselves in the New World because many were captured from the same locales and transported together. Of all the Africans transported from their homelands, 90% went to Latin America. Of the remaining people, they did not come to America as slaves at first, but rather as indentured servants.

The first colonists did not believe in slavery. In The Infortunate: the Voyage and Adventures of William Moraley, ad Indentured Servant, an indentured servant was described as, “A laborer under contract to an employer for a fixed period of time, typically three to seven years, in exchange for their transportation, food, clothing, lodging and other necessities.” Poor Irish, Scottish, English and Africans were all indentured servants for the first 50 years of the colonies.

The eventual dehumanization of Africans in the 1660s changed the descriptions of Africans from Ashanti, Ebol and Bariba to Negro. Before this transition to a color-coded slavery system, people were never black, red or white.

Slaves fought for their own freedom since the Revolutionary War, on both sides. The first to offer freedom as an incentive were the British. “Lord Dunmore put up posters inciting slaves who ran away from their masters to fight for the British in exchange for their freedom,” Windham said. The ploy worked, and soon the colonists were making similar promises. The British were going to abolish slavery. However, after the war, most of the slaves who were promised their freedom were duped out of it.

Instead, many were taken north to Nova Scotia and Halifax, Canada. In the North, quasi-free Negro slaves were hired out and apprenticed, so they had marginally greater freedom of movement. They could not vote, participate in politics or hold any form of employment that competed with “white employment,” so from the beginning “Blacks were not allowed to have legitimate gainful employment. Employment was [racialized].”

It is a misconception that the Civil War was about anything other than racism and slavery. Some historians like to say it was about personal freedom versus tyranny. However, in truth, slavery isn’t incidental. “Go read Jefferson Davis…the confederate leaders say it [white supremacist ideology] clearly in their writings. They make Hitler sound like a boy scout,” Windham lectured as he explained codified racism.

The first laws written in the United States were segregation laws, which dictated that poor whites and poor blacks could not congregate in saloons, churches, stores, etc. unless the elite delegated it. “Humans are pragmatic though and are more humane than that. They understood that they needed each other. They were trying to improve their lives and they did what they needed to do.” Windham said that some in the late 1700s wanted to deal with slavery, to abolish it. It was an expensive system both economically and socially. Yet, the lure of free labor was too much for rich planters.

So when the Revolutionary War failed to address slavery, it came as no shock that the Constitution was written as a slave document. It included the 3/5 compromise which stated that for political purposes each slave would represent 3/5 of a person. This fateful decision was feared to be the only way to agree to the union of the northern and southern colonies into one nation strong enough to gain freedom from England. It delivered political power into the hands of the rich southern planters. We need only to look at who the first presidents of the United States were. Of the first ten presidents of the United States, only John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams did not own slaves.

Some of the abolitionists that made huge contributions to the morale of enslaved African Americans included Benjamin Banneker, Rev. Richard Allen and Olaudah Equiano. Benjamin Banneker was the free African American surveyor, author, farmer, mathematician and astronomer of Baltimore, MD who helped engineer L’Enfant Plaza in Washington.

Reverend Richard Allen founded the first African American United Methodist congregation and was elected its first bishop. He and Absalom Jones founded the Free African Society. When slaves would run away to Philadelphia, they would seat them in their church in the center of the congregation. “In that way the congregation would see them and would take responsibility for them as a community,” Windham spoke as he looked into the eyes of a NOVA student.

Olaudah Equiano was born off of the Niger River and was kidnapped off of the coast and sold into slavery at the age of 11. At first he was treated well, but later he was sold to European slave traders and was taken aboard a slave ship where he witnessed the gruesomeness of the slave trade up close, and of which he gives an account in his autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. As an adult, he acquired his freedom and became an abolitionist.  Windham told of his contribution to other slaves while he worked as a cabin boy on a slave ship was to give news to family members in Africa about their captured relatives back home.

During Black History Month, we cannot help but learn more about the American heroes who have done so much to build this country. Black abolitionists are as much a part of our past as slavery. As much as slavery and racism is a shameful and atrocious part of our history in this nation, when we accept the whole truth of it we move forward and treat each other with mutual respect, appreciating the strength in our diversity as a nation. “As much as we need to remember slavery, we need to understand that we abolished slavery and celebrate that,” Windham encouraged.

By: Annie Ryan

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