The Depths of Unvarnished Prejudice Against Blacks by Educated Northerners On the Verge of the Civil War

A chilling, eye-opening reminder:

 The speech of Francis P. Blair, Jr. (a congressman and Senator of the United States and graduate of Princeton and Yale) to the Mercantile Library in Missouri in January 1859, presents a telling picture of the attitude of many well-educated men and women of the time toward African-Americans.

 

His lengthy talk boiled down to the strong pronouncement that the enslaved people should be set free and re-located to a tropical climate suited to their nature.  His opposition to slavery rested in part in the Declaration of Independence’s assertion that all men are created equal, but also on the belief that slavery threatened the expansion of free White labor, an expansion which Blair felt essential to the health of this still developing country.

 

His position was based on an uncompromising conviction that the White race was superior to all other races, including Native American and African.  He writes that, “The White man is stronger in endurance than the African.  Our country is in the temperate, not the torrid, zone; and we find that, even in…Texas, the emigrant Germans produced the best and highest-priced cotton, and more of it to the acre, than unslaved plantations.  When the cloud (of slavery) passes over Virginia, and its renovation is proscribed in the adjoining Carolinas, it will pass, too, from their worn-out lands and White freeholders will renew them, and make more cotton from their 100-acre fields than will be obtained from plantations of 1,000 devastated by slave culture.”

 

He concludes, “How grandly our nation would loom up, in the eyes of the world, if abandoning the policy which makes it the taskmaster of slaves, it should lay its hands to the work, not only of our freedom to the race which has so long and so faithfully served us and our fathers, but to recompense them for their long servitude, by giving them all homes in regions congenial to their natures, and guaranteeing to them a free government of their own in which, without ceasing to be a part of this country, they should be to themselves and escape the presence of that social subordination and inferiority inseparable from the contact of different races in the same community.  The moral power and grandeur of the act would challenge the admiration of the world, and make our later fame surpass the glory of the great struggle which gives us a place among nations.”

 

I find it surprising that a man as well-educated as Blair, and so well-connected politically, could in 1859 harbor the notion that Blacks could be “exported” to a tropical land.  This had been pursued by the American Colonization Society for decades.  It had been resisted, vociferously, by Black leaders and, from my perspective, had lost traction with political leadership.

 

The overriding conviction by Blair that there were qualities of the African-American race that led them to forever be inferior to Whites is, sadly, a sentiment that still exists among too many 150 years after Blair recorded this unvarnished  conviction.