Stamped from the Beginning: Chapter 14: Imbruted or Civilized Summary & Analysis

In 1825, over one million abolitionist tracts are published in America. These texts characterize enslavers as “evil”; they criticize some racist ideas but produce and disseminate others. After the AASS is founded, white vigilantes start terrorizing Black neighborhoods in Northern cities, destroying properties; gangs of white men rape both white and Black women. A fervent proslavery leader emerges in the form of the South Carolina senator and two-time former vice president John C. Calhoun. Calhoun rejects the idea that slavery is a “necessary evil,” instead firmly claiming that it is “a good—a positive good.” Like Garrison, Calhoun is considered an extremist; both men perceive the other as a potential destroyer of the nation.

The abolitionist movement continues to grow, although the more supporters it gains, the more rifts emerge. When it comes to formal scholarship on race, there is a “virtual consensus” around white superiority and scholars still remain gripped by the monogenesis versus polygenesis debate. In 1842, a scientific controversy emerges when Harvard-educated psychiatrist Edward Jarvis realizes that Northern Black people are 10 times more likely to be deemed insane than the enslaved, leading him to conclude that slavery must have a positive impact on Black people’s psychology. Shortly after, the Southern scientist Dr. Josiah C. Nott publishes a paper arguing that biracial women are less fertile than women of either solely European or African descent. He bases this argument on the idea that biracial women descend from “two distinct species.”

In the 1840s, a debate erupts around the annexation of Texas as a slave state, which broadens into a general discussion of slavery and emancipation in Congress. This horrifies Calhoun, who decides to cite the recent work of an Egyptologist, George R. Gliddon, in his pro-slavery arguments. Gliddon argues that, since ancient times, Black people have been enslaved and kept distinct from white people.

In 1841, Garrison spends three days at a gathering of abolitionists on Nantucket Island, during which he meets a young fugitive named Frederick Douglass. Impressed by his rhetorical skill, the Massachusetts Antislavery Society gives Douglass a job as a traveling speaker. Although the aim of Douglass’s role is to persuade audiences into opposing slavery, the reality of being such an “exhibit” is extremely dehumanizing. Furthermore, whenever Douglass starts speaking philosophically (rather than purely autobiographically), he is told to stop talking. Moreover, audiences regularly protest that Douglass is too intelligent and refined to have ever been enslaved.

In 1845, Douglass publishes The Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, which becomes a bestseller. The book profoundly changes the American public imagination and leads the way for many more slave narratives to be published in the future. Garrison writes the preface but—despite speaking from a staunchly abolitionist perspective—he ends up emphasizing Black inferiority in a way that is sometimes barely distinguishable from his proslavery opponents. Overall, he provides the book with an assimilationist framing in hope that this will win greater support from readers. The preface is “a compellingly racist counterweight to Douglass’s Narrative.”

It is during this period that the telegraph is invented, revolutionizing American media. Writing in the new Southern journal De Bow’s Review, the physician Samuel A. Cartwright—a former student of Benjamin Rush—claims that enslaved people who resist suffer from a disease called “dysesthesia,” which is cured by submitting to the authority and care of white people. Cartwright recommends treating enslaved people like children. Meanwhile, the Alabama doctor J. Marion Sims conducts brutal medical experiments on 11 enslaved women without giving them anesthesia, citing the racist idea that Black people feel less pain.

In 1845, Texas is admitted to the U.S. as a slave state. A border war with Mexico erupts in 1846. An attempt is made to ban slavery in territories seized from Mexico during the war, but President James K. Polk rejects this proposition as “foolish.” In 1847, Garrison writes that proslavery sentiment and racial prejudice is on the decline, though he emphasizes that the battle is still far from won. He has come to understand that resentment of elite, assimilated Black people is a powerful force, but he still cannot bring himself to abandon the tactic of uplift suasion. In 1850, a bargain is struck that attempts another compromise between enslavers and abolitionists: California is admitted as a free state, while the disciplinary force of the Fugitive Slave Act is increased. 

In 1850, a debate over polygenesis erupts at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual conference in Charleston. Attendees discuss the physical differences between the races, emphasizing the idea that white people’s bodies represent the ideal standard from which Black people deviate. The meeting is attended not just by scholars, but many members of the general public as well. Days after the conference ends, John C. Calhoun is pronounced dead.