Central to the views of Maria Stewart in her 1832 speech titled “Why Sit Ye Here and Die?” and those of Henry Highland Garnet as portrayed in his 1843 “An Address to the Slaves of the United States,” was the assertion that persons of African descent had to fight for their freedom. According to Stewart, any efforts made by “the advocates of freedom” stood a chance to be as in vain as the death of Christ for those who refused the “offered mercy” unless the free people of color made “some mighty efforts” to rescue their counterparts from slavery (1832, par.11). A little over a decade later, Henry Highland Garnet made a similar declaration. In the man’s words, “the time [had] come when [blacks] must act for [themselves]”; naturally, the enslaved were the only people capable of doing the “work of emancipation” since they knew the bitterness of bondage (1843, par. 10). The points made by each speaker make sense when one considers the fact that by then the Union was more than half a century old, with the year of conception being 1776 after the Thirteen Colonies declared their independence. By that logic, for more than fifty years, the white populace of the United States boasted liberty and democracy as its fundamental principles but had no inclination to grant people of African ancestry the same treatment. On the contrary, slavery took deeper roots after the American Revolution than it did during the Colonial period when the British were in power. Hence, regardless of their efforts towards independence, men and women of color were only eligible for “a peck of corn and a few herrings per week,” most likely rations that masters gave their human chattels (Garnet, 1843, par.11).
The importance of the idea of the black populace fighting for their freedom stems from the reality that abolitionism not only gained its roots in the Union between 1800 and 1845 but also marked a change in the characteristics of the fight against slavery: blacks were no longer waiting on the whites to help. In contrast to the themes of the eighteenth century, where there was hope that the federal government would step in liberate slaves from bondage, the nineteenth century witnessed a change as the free and enslaved blacks realized the government was not for their numbers.
References
Garnet, H. H. (1843). An Address To The Slaves Of The United States. Retrieved from BlackPast.org: http://www.blackpast.org/1843-henry-highland-garnet-address-slaves-united-states
Stewart, M. W. (1832). Why Sit Ye Here and Die? Retrieved from BlackPast.org: http://www.blackpast.org/1832-maria-w-stewart-why-sit-ye-here-and-die
