©2004 Dennis L. Durst.  Any archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text in any medium requires the consent of the author.

©2004 Dennis L. Durst.  Any archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text in any medium requires the consent of the author.

©2004 Dennis L. Durst.  Any archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text in any medium requires the consent of the author.

©2004 Dennis L. Durst.  Any archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text in any medium requires the consent of the author.

©2004 Dennis L. Durst.  Any archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text in any medium requires the consent of the author.

©2004 Dennis L. Durst.  Any archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text in any medium requires the consent of the author.

©2004 Dennis L. Durst.  Any archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text in any medium requires the consent of the author.

©2004 Dennis L. Durst.  Any archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text in any medium requires the consent of the author.

Introduction

Wilson Jeremiah Moses is a contemporary scholar well known for his analysis of messianic themes in the history of black leadership in America. Noting the religious context in which a mythology of black messianism has been nurtured, Moses concluded that a fresh model for understanding African Americans as agents of social change is needed. "The problem for the future" noted Moses, "is to discover whether or not a social reform movement can function outside the hotbed of Protestant evangelicalism that, for better and for worse, has been its environment for over two hundred years."¹ While Moses appears to accent the worse, and my analysis to follow may seem to accent the better, in any event we would concur that the key investigative category for the history of black leadership, namely messianism, stands in need of a significant re-evaluation. This re-evaluation has already begun in a variety of venues, and for this the historian can be thankful. Whereas messianism as a mythic approach to the history of American black leaders has its obvious appeal and its vital exemplars, the two fundamental modes of messianism, namely the polarities of militancy and martyrdom, tend to obscure flesh and blood figures who defy such stark categories.

One such figure, who serves as the subject for this essay, is John Berry Meachum (1789-1854). Meachum held a multiplicity of roles over his lifetime. He was once a slave, then a freedman. He became a Baptist preacher in St. Louis, Missouri, where he also engaged in entrepreneurship and promoted educational reform. He became a national figure by addressing the National Negro Convention in 1846, and a local activist by founding the "Floating Freedom School" on the Mississippi River after 1847. Meachum's multiple roles sometimes stood in tension or even in conflict with one another. I argue that Meachum's complex mingling of numerous leadership roles, none of which were really "messianic," has rendered him a somewhat marginal figure in historiography. Neither a militant nor a martyr, Meachum was a nonetheless a prophetic figure.² His educational vision, his entrepreneurship, and his appeals to the biblical trope of "Ethiopia" blend other-worldly and this-worldly values in ways that seem inherently perplexing, even contradictory to the historian. His contextual specificity itself makes his life susceptible to obscurity-the obscurity (to use a biblical phrase) of a prophet without honor in his own country.

Marginality -- existence on the margins, borderlines, or interstices of society, can contribute to a person's becoming barely perceptible. Whether it was in his own day, when his status as a freedman made him an "other," neither slave nor citizen in Antebellum America; or in his portrayal in historiography, wherein he receives brief but respectful mention, Meachum seems peripheral. Unlike his contemporary Henry Highland Garnet, for example, Meachum was not sufficiently radical to attract the ire of the white community. Yet Meachum was not merely acquiescent in the face of unjust laws in his state suppressing the aspirations of slaves and former slaves for uplift and dignity, a fact that renders him unlike the Uncle Tom stereotype. Meachum's ability to gain a stage for his words and actions among his peers within the free black community, as seen in his participation as a speaker at the 1846 National Negro Convention in Philadelphia, makes clear that at least some of his peers accorded him respect. In a sense, Meachum's multiple roles make him a challenging enigma for the historian, but perhaps these very enigmatic qualities in Meachum's life and words contribute to our correcting or nuancing the polarized ways the history black leadership can often be analyzed.

Meachum's Educational Vision

In 1815, having recently purchased his own freedom, John Berry Meachum followed his still-enslaved wife Mary from Kentucky to St. Louis. He had only three dollars in his pocket. The son of a Baptist minister, Meachum eagerly accepted the tutelage of another Baptist preacher, a white missionary named John Mason Peck.³ Over the next few years, they worked together with other blacks and whites to educate slave children in the basic skills of literacy. "Baptists did not require literacy as a prerequisite for preachers or members," writes Janet Duitsman Cornelius, "but black leaders who seized the opportunities open to them as Baptists showed an interest in learning and teaching fellow slaves to read."⁴

Through a day school instituted by John Mason Peck, the Meachums became involved in Christian education for slave children. During the years of 1818-1822, whites and blacks worshipped together under Peck's leadership. However, as the number of black Baptists grew, the church leaders (whether the decision was mutual between black and white believers is unclear) deemed it expedient that black congregants have their own, separate meetings. John Berry Meachum gradually took over leadership of the newly-formed congregation, and he was formally ordained in 1825. That year Meachum and other members of the black Baptist community established the First African Baptist Church of St. Louis. The congregation, by then numbering about 220 members, including some 200 slaves, built a new house of worship at Third and Almond Streets in 1827.⁵

In the 1820s Meachum's deep commitment to the education of slave children became evident. The Sunday School movement was a growing component of Protestant religious instruction for children throughout the nation, and, in general, the movement was well received in the Protestant community of St. Louis. An editorial on Sunday Schools in the January 16, 1823 issue of Missouri Republican commented that: "Instruction in the doctrines of Christianity presupposes a knowledge of the rudiments of education. Children must be taught to both read and think, in order to be initiated effectually into that sublime system."⁶ Historian Donnie Bellamy has commented that "Abundance of evidence suggests that blacks and whites waged a holy war against black illiteracy throughout the antebellum era in Missouri."⁷ Meachum's endeavor to educate slave children was not a purely religious, catechetical enterprise, but was an effort to equip them for a better future, a hoped-for future of freedom from slavery and grinding poverty.⁸

Over time, with tensions in the region over the future of slavery in Missouri, and with reports of slave revolts in other parts of the country, local St. Louis officials saw the enterprise of teaching slave children to read as a subversive activity. In the early 1820s, the city's Board of Trustees passed an ordinance prohibiting the education of either free or slave blacks. The lumping together of slave and free children made clear the racist roots of their action. Punishments for violations of this ordinance ranged from twenty lashes to imprisonment and fines.⁹

Rules against literacy education for slave children were enforced only sporadically, yet Meachum's efforts encountered active opposition as when the local Sheriff arrested Meachum and a white Englishman whom he had hired as a teacher while they were instructing their students in the church basement. Following this incident, the school's students were scattered, and local authorities forced the school's closure by means of threats against Meachum and Peck. Meachum's commitment to the education of African American children and the risks he took on their behalf would affect such young students as James Milton Turner, who was present when Meachum was arrested. Turner later became one of St. Louis's most prominent black citizens and, as an adult, would champion black education in Missouri and serve at the national level as a Consul to Liberia under President Grant.¹⁰

Meachum's biographical experiences had an obvious impact on the advice he would offer to other free blacks in his 1846 Address to all the Colored Citizens of the United States. Since "industriousness" had paid off in terms of freedom and economic success for Meachum, he was convinced such a path would contribute to the uplift of his people generally. The specific contours of his ideology of economic and educational empowerment and the centrality of industriousness to his educational philosophy are evident in the Address. His rhetoric was sharp, but I believe Meachum used this tone because of his firm belief in the inherent and latent abilities in his hearers and readers, both free blacks and slaves:

In order that we might do more for our young children, I would recommend manual labor schools to be established in the different states, so as the children could have free access to them. And I would recommend in these schools pious teachers, either white or colored, who would take all pains with the children to bring them up in piety, and in industrious habits. We must endeavor to have our children look up a little, for they are too many to lie in idleness and dishonor.¹¹

It would not be hard to criticize Meachum's "bootstrap philosophy" of economic empowerment as simplistic and unrealistic. After all, not all slaveholders gave their slaves the option of buying their own freedom, very few southern states held manumission to be a legal option, and the very notion of having to buy one's liberty only cast into bold relief the fundamental injustice of reducing humans to the status of property to begin with. Nonetheless, Meachum's efforts to empower people through those means available to them appears to have been a subtle method of subverting the peculiar institution, even if too slowly or too conventionally in the minds of many of his contemporaries or of later historians. Economic empowerment for blacks was a form of protest, particularly within the context of the severe limitations placed on free blacks in antebellum Missouri. As Gayle T. Tate has noted:

Although the nationalist components of racial unity and spiritual redemption provided much of the driving force behind Black resistance, pragmatic nationalism's emphasis on material elevation, education, organization, and the acquisition of property was not overshadowed. Thus, collective material progress was seen not only as dispelling the stereotypical notions of African inferiority but as a central force in Black resistance.¹²

Conformity to American capitalistic methods, then, when contextualized against white assumptions about free blacks, can be read as a subversive activity.

The twin themes of piety and industrious habits that Meachum stressed in the Address echoed his own core values as a Baptist preacher and as an entrepreneur. Eddie S. Glaude has noted the intense internal focus of the Negro Convention movement on "respectability." His analysis bears quoting at length here:

The thinking went something like this: if we changed our attitudes and behaviour then we could command the respect of others. In this view, the problems lay with our slothfulness and intemperance. We need only correct this "impoverished" way of living and the difficulties facing the community would inevitably disappear. The latter responded to the problem of racism by accenting the agency of black people, insisting that they were capable of responding, through self-critique and improvement, to the problems facing the black community. This immanent conversation constituted a call of sorts for solidaristic efforts to reject white paternalism and to alleviate the condition of black people in general.¹³

Meachum's active participation in the early Temperance movement and his strong warnings to the slaves he emancipated about the negative effects of strong drink should be understood in light of his commitment to respectability.¹⁴

Meachum's Address is also characterized by considerable attention to the biblical basis for his advice and admonishments and his rhetoric is laced with moral imperatives rooted in Biblical quotations and allusions. Meachum employed some thirty biblical passages in the first twelve pages of the Address. In arguing for education of the young, he quoted Proverbs 22:6: "Train up a child the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it." His determination to educate the young arose from the central interpersonal ethic of Christian theology: self-sacrificial love. Meachum pled: "'Love your neighbor as yourself,' is the command of the New Testament. We are morally bound by the law of God to teach this to our children."¹⁵ He interwove further scriptural justification for his educational vision into his narrative, appealing to a generalized sense of parental duty:

I ask the reader, if it would not be to the glory of God for us to endeavor to train up our children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord? Then if you think so, let us feel it a duty enjoined upon every son and daughter of our race, to endeavor to become united, that we may throw our mites together, and have schools in every state and county where the free children are in large numbers.¹⁶

Even as Meachum provided strong arguments based in biblical precepts in support of the education of black children and emphasized the elements of conformity to the principles of American capitalism and nineteenth-century notions of respectability, the context in which he delivered his Address remained tense. Some free blacks and supportive whites in the border states engaged in increased educational activity, in concert with disseminating a growing abolitionist literature. This was evident in St. Louis, which in the 1830s was a city in turmoil over the pamphlets of Alton, Illinois abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy, who eventually became a martyr to the abolitionist cause.¹⁷ This agitation, along with growing fears over the increasing number of free blacks in St. Louis, led Missouri's white power structure to pass draconian measures that by the late 1840s would severely restrict educational opportunities for blacks in the state.

Less than a year after Meachum published the Address, Missouri Governor John C. Edwards similarly promoted statewide implementation of manual labor schools for blacks, but his rhetoric rang hollow for African-Americans in the state. The chain of events that followed Edwards' proposal raised the stakes for Meachum's congregation and the children they sought to educate. Meachum's response to the challenges posed by the power structure of his own state of Missouri has firmly assured his place in the local lore of St. Louis, and increasingly in the broader story of African American history. Early in the year 1847, Missouri's legislature passed resolutions challenging Governor Edwards to detail his plan for the education of teachers and for the establishment of common schools for the citizens of Missouri and Edwards' reply documented the broad outlines of his plan. While some rhetoric in the document could alternately amuse or offend us today, it does provide a glimpse into the stock vocabulary of democratic idealism utilized in this period:

The young men sent to each [of] the district or township schools, should impart nothing but true knowledge. The farmer or the mechanic-the shoemaker or the miller-the blacksmith or the carpenter-the spinner or the weaver-the engineer or the machine maker, if properly instructed himself, can impart knowledge as correctly as the lawyer or physician, the merchant or divine.¹⁸

Edwards laid out an apparently progressive, forward-looking design for state education, one purportedly inclusive of all classes and genders, and inculcating industriousness by blending book learning with practical labor. But a mere ten days after Edwards's lofty goals became public record, he signed into law a different piece of legislation directly relevant to education in Missouri giving the lie to his democratic rhetoric. Its words are jarring:

Be it enacted by the General Assembly of the State of Missouri, as follows:
1. No person shall keep or teach any school for the instruction of negroes or mulattoes, in reading or writing, in this State.
2. No meeting or assemblage of negroes or mulattoes, for the purpose of religious worship, or preaching, shall be held or permitted where the services are performed or conducted by negroes or mulattoes, unless some sheriff, constable, marshal, police officer, or justice of the peace, shall be present during all the time of such meeting or assemblage, in order to prevent all seditious speeches, and disorderly and unlawful conduct of every kind.¹⁹

This legislation was an extension of a political history of imposing increasingly repressive laws in Missouri that structured life for both enslaved and free blacks. In 1817, the territory of Missouri had attempted to forestall slave uprisings by prohibiting assembly or travel by free blacks. In 1825 came a law rendering blacks legally incompetent to serve as witnesses in trials involving whites. In 1835 blacks were stripped of the right to bear arms and restrictions were placed on black participation in apprenticeships. That same year, freedom of movement in and out of the state was limited to those free blacks who obtained a license by posting an expensive bond, or by having whites vouch for them.²⁰ Edwards and the Missouri legislators were reflecting national trends and tensions as well. The 1842 Supreme Court decision Prigg vs. Pennsylvania had upheld the fugitive slave law of 1793.²¹ Local conditionas as well worsened the situation for Meachum and his sympathizers. St. Louis had a reputation for special harshness in dealing with its slave populace, arguably due to its tense geographical and demographic situation as a border city with a significant black population, both slave and free.²²

Literacy education, as is widely noted by historians, was something of a "holy grail" for slaves and former slaves in the antebellum South and Meachum and other African Americans in Missouri were shaped by this sensibility and responded to the legislation of 1847 in light of this perspective. Literacy meant African-Americans could read the parts of the Bible whites neglected to teach them, that they could read the promises of the nation's founding documents, and that they could become self-sufficent and break their dependence on a master. According to one study of the subject, literacy also meant the following to black people in slavery: identity formation (identity as freedom), self-worth, self-determination, communal expressions of resistance to oppression, the creation of a liberating religious consciousness, and a breaking of dependency upon whites.²³

As a pioneering figure in black literacy, Meachum's greatest claim to fame developed not so much from his words in the Address of 1846, but in his actions in response to the repressive legislation of 1847. The 1847 statute went beyond prohibiting literacy training for black children. It struck at the very heart of African-American aspirations and identity, for it targeted freedom of worship and assembly along with freedom to receive an education (thus violating numerous provisions of the Bill of Rights). Worship services were the one context in which slaves and former-slaves could express their heartfelt anguish and experience a catharsis otherwise unavailable and the Sunday School was the central educational institution of African-American life. Strictures placed upon such avenues for black agency cried out for an activist response and Meachum, the preacher, educator, and entrepreneur, soon made a bold and subversive move.

By 1847, Meachum's instructional enterprise violated both city ordinance and state law. In response, he developed a plan of action that thwarted the law without actually breaking it. The term civil disobedience is inadequate to describe Meachum's subsequent actions as it is premised on breaking an unjust law and then suffering unjust consequences so as to appeal to the conscience of the oppressor. But Meachum's action flouted the unjust law, without technically breaking it. After the Missouri Legislature passed the 1847 law, Meachum procured a boat and equipped it with a library, and to this he added tables, benches, and the other accoutrements of a classroom. He anchored his vessel in the federally-protected Mississippi river and began to shuttle slave children out to the craft in small skiffs. John Berry Meachum's "Floating Freedom School," as it came to be known, was a bold act of defiance, demonstrating his power and agency as an educator.²⁴ The boldness of the move is emphasized when we consider the observation in "The Narrative of William Wells Brown" that Francis McIntosh, a free colored man from Pittsburgh, had been taken from a steamboat named The Flora, and had been burned at the stake near the city of St. Louis. ²⁵ Despite such dangers, teachers from the East came to join Meachum's effort, indicating that the fame of his activity had spread beyond his local context.²⁶

Again, Meachum's marginality is highlighted by these events, and even given a literal geographical expression by Meachum's activities. Technically, the Floating Freedom School, located in a federal space (the Mississippi River) and a marginal area separating a free from a slave state, did not violate the law. Quiet and largely out of public view, the school was not a boisterous form of protest. Yet it was a sign that free blacks such as Meachum would not simply acquiesce in the removal of the key avenue to their aspirations of self-improvement and economic empowerment. I suggest a neologism, perhaps civil misobedience, to capture the spirit of Meachum's activist educational stratagem.

The gap between Meachum's idealistic rhetoric on the national stage, and the conditions he soon faced at the local level, manifested a bitter and harsh reality. In the year 1849 St. Louis suffered a devastating cholera epidemic, eventually claiming some 6,000 lives. On May 19, a fire spread from a levee to river vessels and buildings along the riverfront. Twenty-three steamboats were destroyed; fifteen city blocks of buildings were gutted, and estimates of damage range from three to six million dollars. Yet despite these hardships, the citizens of St. Louis turned out the following month to vote in favor of a school tax by a margin of two to one.²⁷ By contrasting the enthusiasm of St. Louisans for educating white children with the state law barring literacy to "negroes and mulattoes," such rank hypocrisy cried out for an activist response. Thus Meachum's Floating Freedom School's education of black children into the 1850s not only improved the lot of those children, but stood as a prophetic rebuke to the unjust social conditions that made such measures necessary.

Meachum's Entrepreneurship

Meachum was not only a preacher and an educator, but an entrepreneur and emancipator. The growing number of blacks moving from slavery to freedom gave Meachum practical opportunities to train his fellow blacks in marketable skills, which in turn led to their increased self-empowerment. In the state of Missouri, one of only two southern states that did not criminalize manumission, the free black population experienced a dramatic increase Between 1820 and 1850, the ranks of liberated African-Americans rose from 347 free blacks in 1820 to 2,618 free blacks in 1850. Ira Berlin's classic study of freedmen notes that ". . . while rural Missourians rarely freed their slaves, a growing number of St. Louis masters liberated their bondsmen or allowed them to buy their freedom."²⁸

Free blacks in the antebellum South were marginal figures who often had to keep their activities at a low level of visibility. As living proof of the falsity of much racist rhetoric about the abilities of blacks, they were often treated with deep suspicion and fear by white slaveholders and legislators. As Berlin's analysis shows, their numbers relative to the population fluctuated from decade to decade, but by 1810 were showing signs of decline. After 1820 most southern states passed laws in an attempt to restrict manumission. Such laws were flouted in a variety of ways. Perhaps more inhibitory was the ire any manumitting master would incur from his slaveholding contemporaries. Whatever the reason, the rate of legal manumission generally slowed down in the years before the Civil War. The proportion of African-Americans who were legally classified as free in the South declined from 8.1% in 1820 to 6.2% by 1860. Yet in sheer numbers during that period (given the numerical increase among African-Americans generally), the (legally) free black populace grew from 134,223 to 261,918.²⁹

Masters desirous of manumitting their slaves and slaves eager for their freedom devised numerous ways of circumventing the laws. Straightforwardly illegal manumission, nominal manumission (i.e., individuals who were slaves "on paper" but not in practice), manumission procured by subterfuge, and deathbed or testamentary manumission describe just a few of the ways slaves could achieve a greater measure of freedom.³⁰

For some (at least prior to the passage of restrictive laws), legal means seemed the most expedient way of leaving enslavement behind. John Berry Meachum started his life in slavery in the state of Virginia, was moved to North Carolina and later to Kentucky by his master, Paul Meachum. His 1846 Address contains a brief autobiographical account of his life that bears review here in the context of examining his development as a religious leader, educator, entrepreneur, and abolitionist. Having been granted by his master some time to earn his own money, Meachum worked in a saltpeter cave in Kentucky in order to earn enough money to purchase his own freedom. Once free, he moved from Kentucky back to his home state of Virginia in order to emancipate his father. According to an extant sermon preached by a protégé of John Berry Meachum's shortly after his death, his former master (Paul Meachum), himself near death, granted John Berry Meachum charge of some seventy-five slaves and instructed him to move them north into Ohio to free them. In Ohio the group was greeted by an angry mob, but the mob was dispersed through circumstances John Berry Meachum later would attribute to prayer and providence. These slaves eventually were liberated and settled in the state of Indiana.³¹ John Berry Meachum's wife Mary, still enslaved, had been moved to Missouri during his emancipatory task in Indiana, so he had learned of her move by heart-rending discovery. Now destitute of funds, he had to work for a time to earn travel money. After earning enough money to travel west, he followed Mary and worked for her emancipation. By the time of the 1846 address, he boasted that he had freed some twenty additional slaves by purchasing them and teaching them skills of economic self-reliance.

Using the slave system against itself was perhaps a triumph of pragmatism over principle. Yet this was a far cry from the stereotypical "Uncle Tom" motif in Meachum's case, because while he expressed affection for his former master, he did not remain with that master's family but sought a life of greater independence. His own family took precedence over the household in which he was raised, even if he at times expressed affection for Paul Meachum. John Berry Meachum's experience of self-emancipation, articulated in his sermons and in his 1846 Address doubtless resonated with many free blacks who had likewise exerted initiative in their own liberation. The historian-separated by time and social comforts from the existential realities of antebellum black experience-- does best to refrain from passing value judgments on the actions of those under oppression doing what they can. Given the practical exigencies of their situation and status, one can admire the efforts of antebellum blacks to secure the greatest measure of freedom available to them by the means most readily at their disposal. For some slaves, such as Moses Roper, the sheer cruelty of the master dictated that escape was the only viable approach.³² For others, such as Denmark Vesey and Henry Highland Garnet, outright violent revolt appeared to be both opportune and principled. For Meachum, a less radical path presented itself and he seized upon it. Meachum used the peculiar institution to subvert that same institution, at least in the case of that limited number of apprentices he was able to set free.

Meachum's entrepreneurial capitalism illustrates the impulse toward democracy and voluntarism nurtured by the independent black church movement, particularly in its Baptist and Methodist iterations. As Nathan O. Hatch has noted, "By its democratization in black hands, the church served as the major rallying point for human dignity, freedom, and equality among those who bore slavery's cruel yoke."³³ Meachum's own appropriation of a democratic ethos recast the matter of self-determination in terms both biblical and African by employing in the Address an obscure passage in the book of Psalms. He pointed to a reference to Ethiopia (drawn from Psalm 68:31, KJV) a text that proved particularly evocative for antebellum African Americans, with its bracing words: "Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands to God."

Part II | Notes