By racial equality I mean the idea that intellectually(and spiritually or morally to get unscientific) the average white person and the average black person were equal?
You see often people bring up the fact in writing Lincoln affirm his idea that whites were superior, even if slavery was wrong.
What about the average abolitionist? Would they have held a more modern view, or was the idea that while slavery was horrible blacks were still not equal to whites.
How radical would the modern view have been at the time?
Pretty radical. The majority of white people felt that whites were superior to blacks. Abolitionists generally argued that just because blacks were inferior to whites didn’t mean they should be enslaved. Some white people went further and said that blacks should be legally equal to whites. Only a few white people felt that blacks and whites were equal in all aspects.
Yea I assumed it would be a minority viewpoint, but I wanted to get a feel for just how out there it would be to people of the time.
I see people comment that they are stunned that Lincoln of all people would feel whites were superior, like it shattered their worldview. But what they are missing is that was the default position, but I didn’t know just how extreme it was.
Most Northern abolitionists were racist and regarded blacks as inferior. As late as the 1840’s largely-abolitionist New England enacted criminal penalties for miscegenation.
The notable exception was JohnBrown, the great abolitionist whom Ralph W. Emerson compared to the Christ.
The “default position” was that blacks were clearly inferior since they were running around naked with spears while whites had developed far superior culture and technology. This was proof of the white’s superior intellect and morality. Many people feared giving blacks any kind of freedom, as they were certain that those near-animals would not be able to control themselves and complete chaos would ensue. Blacks were better off being slaves. At least then the superior white folks could make sure that they were properly taken care of.
It was pretty progressive at the time just to believe that we shouldn’t horribly beat and abuse those poor inferior black folk. It was probably also a majority view that we should gather up all those poor inferior blacks and ship them all back to Africa. Or if that’s not practical, let’s shove them all on some island somewhere, like maybe in the Caribbean.
Lincoln himself originally supported the idea of sending the blacks back to Africa. He didn’t think blacks would ever be able to integrate into white society since blacks would never be able to forgive whites for enslaving them. As time went on, he began to realize that sending them all to Africa would never be practical and he eventually backed away from the idea.
Lincoln would be a horrible racist by modern standards, as would most of the abolitionists back then. That doesn’t make them horrible people, though. Considering the prevailing attitudes of the time, they were very progressive and were at least moving in the right direction ,and that alone deserves a lot of credit.
Lincoln believed that blacks were intellectually inferior, but he also believed that they were men and should be treated equally, and that idea alone was very progressive at the time and Lincoln deserves a lot of credit for thinking it. Lincoln had a hard time envisioning a society where blacks and whites lived together as equals, but considering the society that they lived in at the time I can understand that.
Also, you have to be a little careful when interpreting some of the things that Lincoln said. When he was making speeches to extremely racist audiences, a lot of times he was assuring them that even though his equality views were a bit radical, he wasn’t trying to make blacks marry whites and fully integrate them into society or anything like that. Since Lincoln was just trying to assure his racist audiences that he wasn’t trying to make their worst fears come true, a lot of Lincoln’s comments end up sounding a lot more racist than Lincoln really was.
Don’t forget that the 14th amendment (ratified 3 years after the assassination, but I bet it contained a lot of Lincoln’s ideas) declared blacks equal before the law. That it took 100 years to enforce is another matter.
A lot of the impetus for segregation must be to prevent mixed marriages.
But keep in mind that the attitude was prevalent well into the 20th century that different groups were “beneath us”. Variously, eastern Europeans and southern Europeans were considered less than equal despite the fact they were (“technically”) white people. Hitler’s ideas did not spring from nowhere, he just took the general tenor of the times to an extreme. Even the French were considered somehow deficit, something we don’t believe today… Women, of course, were also not the equal of men… and even within the lily-white anglo-saxons, there was a class distinction as those rude people who worked the land, while technically equal in the eyes of the law, were obviously inferior intellectually and therefore morally to the educated, ruling class.
So the concept was there. Failure of a group be the functional equal of educated, worldly (white) intellectuals was taken as de facto proof they could never be so.
The idea was around, but it was considered highly radical. About as radical as the idea that women are women regardless of class and color, or that they (well, those of a high enough class to have pretty little heads) might want to be allowed to worry their pretty little heads with politics.
Neither of these two ladies would have been considered his equal by the immense majority of men, of any color; they certainly weren’t considered the equals of white women, much less of white ladies. They disagreed, sometimes loudly.
If the Radical Republicans didn’t believe in racial equality, they sure did a good job of acting like it. They wouldn’t have held Congress for a decade after the Civil War if this was totally unpalatable to all the voters, and they didn’t come from nowhere – people had these beliefs before 1865.
I think the reason you may think that EVERY abolitionist was “still racist by our standards,” besides neo-Confederate propaganda, is that prior to 1865 they had to tone down their public rhetoric to court moderate support. The Republicans’ big promise to voters was “by keeping slavery and plantations out of the territories, we’ll preserve good-paying jobs and farmland for you, the free whites.” The core of integrationists was able to build a coalition big enough to win elections by this approach, and maybe Lincoln was a true believer in the paternalist middle ground, but a good number of people like Thaddeus Stevens and Zachariah Chandler really believed in equality all along and were able to rise to political power in antebellum America without doing much to hide that fact.
The Quakers supported abolition as early as 1670, and awarded membership regardless of race in 1790. (Some groups much sooner, but this was the large group’s decision.)
This is true, but many of Lincolns earlier speeches must be also modified by the fact that his views were clearly changing.
This book:
is pretty conclusive. In fact Lincoln even came to agree that Blacks should get the Vote in his last term. Bit by bit Lincoln had met educated and intelligent Black people, as opposed to the un-educated slaves and free sharecroppers of his youth, and his views were modified. Mind you, he was always against slavery, and he always agreed Blacks were humans too.
Yes,but did they treat blacks as complete equals socially, in our modern (=post 1980) concept of equality?
Did any Quakers marry blacks?
Allowing membership in the church is nice and progressive. But that doesn’t mean that people in 1790 who were opposed to slavery were also able conceive of racial equality the way we do today.
Even in modern times, things have changed radically in one generation: In 1960, the idea of racial equality was different than today.
When marching with Martin Luther King, lots of good, well- meaning whites were willing to walk arm-in-arm with a black man in public. But they weren’t so happy about letting their daughter walk hand-in-hand with a black man in private.
If you read about Frederick Douglas, he dealt alot with this back in the 1860’s. Basically that while many whites favored ending slavery, they still didnt see blacks as equals and he worked hard to deal with that.
I don’t think anyone is disputing that many people, or the majority of people, or the people making the rules, were racists. The question is whether the group of people that did support full equality were real or had some influence at certain places and times. The people who keep posting every example of racism they can think of aren’t really shedding any light on that issue.
How is that racist? They were a band, they got paid. “Colored music” was all the rage. Today we call it "Jazz and Blues’. The term is certainly no longer Politically Correct, but it was fairly progressive in 1930’s.
How many musicians are Black today? Are we racists as we expect them to sing and dance for us? :rolleyes:
Women, of course, were also not the equal of men… and even within the lily-white anglo-saxons, there was a class distinction as those rude people who worked the land, while technically equal in the eyes of the law, were obviously inferior intellectually and therefore morally to the educated, ruling class.