The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation by David Brion Davis Page B

heart.” Grimké then stresses that it is much easier for all people, who are “alive to bodily pain,” to apprehend the slaves’
physical
sufferings. Only a comparative few appreciate the slaves’ “mental and spiritual degradation”—that is, the effects of dehumanization:
    Slavery seizes a rational and immortal being crowned by Jehovah with glory and honor, and drags him down to a level with the beasts that perish. It makes him a thing, a chattel personal, a machine to be used to all intents and purposes for the benefit of another.… It would annihilate the individual worth and responsibility conferred upon man by his Creator. It deprives him of the power of self-improvement.… It prevents him from laboring in a sphere to which his capacities are adapted. It abrogates the seventh commandment, by annulling the obligations of marriage, and obliging the slaves to live in a state of promiscuous intercourse, concubinage, and adultery.… It dooms its victims to ignorance, and consequently to vice.
    The
Address
then quotes SouthernerSamuel McDowell Moore, who delivered a blistering attack on slavery during the debate overemancipation and deportation in Virginia’sHouse of Delegates, in January 1832, in response toNat Turner’s revolt:
    I think I may safely assert that ignorance is the inseparable companion of slavery, and that the desire of freedom [evidenced by Nat Turner] is the inevitable consequence of implanting in the human mind any useful degree of intelligence: it is therefore the policy of the master that ignorance of his slaves should be as profound as possible; and such a state of ignorance is wholly incompatible with the existence of any moral principles or exalted feeling in the breast of the slave. 22
    So depicting slavery “at its worst” creates a huge dilemma. Grimké is now calling for the emancipation of dehumanized humans whose supposed ignorance and lack of foresight would seem to preclude any capability of becoming responsible free citizens or participants in the social compact. Grimké clearly recognized the danger of slipping into a racist conclusion, a circular, self-perpetuating argument in which the dehumanization of slavery leads to an Aristotelian view of the docile “natural slave,” of men
born
to be bondsmen.
    It was doubtless Sarah Grimké’s stroke of brilliance to add the citation, “(Speech of Mr. Moore, House of Delegates, Va., 1832),” following the passage above that “such a state of ignorance is wholly incompatible with the existence of any moral principles or exaltedfeeling in the breast of the slave.” Nat Turner’s bloody insurrection was still a vivid memory, especially in the minds of many free blacks and white Southerners such as Grimké. 23 If the Executive Committee of the AASS had earlier seen the wisdom of praising the “peaceful endurance” ofNew York City blacks when confronting a racist mob, this was now an occasion, for Grimké, to refer very obliquely to theslaves’ desire for freedom and capacity for armed resistance—to the slaveholders’ failure at achieving full dehumanization.
    Later on there is another significant reference to the Nat Turner–inspired Virginia legislative debate, following an appeal to Northern free blacks to consider abstaining, “as far as practicable,” from the products of slave labor. After stressing that friends of emancipation were increasingly interested in such a boycott and in finding free labor substitutes, Grimké affirms that the Southern slave will rejoice at the news that his Northern friends “feel a sympathy so deep for his sufferings, that they cannot partake of the proceeds of his unrequited toil.” But how could supposedly ignorant, dehumanized chattel be aware of Northern abolitionists? One answer came from “Mr. Goode,” whose resolution produced “the celebrated debate” in the Virginia legislature, and who reminded planters who were in a state of near panic over Turner’s rebellion that many