Dennis
L. Durst
The Reverend John Berry Meachum (1789-1854)
of St. Louis: Prophet and
Entrepreneurial Black Educator in Historiographical Perspective
NOTES:
1. Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms: Social and Literary Manipulations of a Religious Myth, Revised Ed. (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), 238, cf. 1-16.
2. For references to Meachum in the secondary literature, see Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 201-204; Michael Patrick Williams, "The Black Evangelical Ministry in the Antebellum Border States: Profiles of Elders John Berry Meachum and Noah Davis," Foundations 21 (1978), 225-41; George E. Stevens, History of Central Baptist Church (St. Louis: King Publishing, 1927), 7; Edward A. Freeman, The Epoch of Negro Baptists and the Foreign Mission Board (Kansas City: The Central Seminary Press, 1953), 60-61; N. Webster Moore, "John Berry Meachum (1789-1854): St. Louis Pioneer, Black Abolitionist, Educator, and Preacher," Bulletin of the Missouri Historical Society 29 (1973), 96-103; Donnie D. Bellamy, "The Education of Blacks in Missouri Prior to 1861," Journal of Negro History 59 (1974), 149-50; Alberta D. and David O. Shipley, The History of Black Baptists in Missouri (National Baptist Convention USA: n. p., 1976), 22; Jean E. Meeh Gosebrink and Candace O'Connor, eds., Discovering African-American St. Louis: A Guide to Historic Sites (St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society, 1994), 2.
3. For details on Peck see John Mason Peck, Forty Years of Pioneer Life: Memoir of John Mason Peck, D.D., edited by Rufus Babcock (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965), passim.
4. Janet Duitsman Cornelius, "When I Can Read My Title Clear": Literacy, Slavery, and Religion in the Antebellum South (University of South Carolina Press, 1991), 21.
6. Cited in Ralph E. Glauert, "Education and Society in Ante-Bellum Missouri" (Ph.D. diss., University of Missouri, 1973), 92.
10. Ibid., 100; Lawrence O. Christensen, "Schools for Blacks: J. Milton Turner in Reconstruction Missouri," Missouri Historical Review 76 (1982): 121-35; Gary R. Kremer, James Milton Turner and the Promise of America: The Public Life of a Post-Civil War Black Leader (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1991), 53-57.
11. John Berry Meachum, An Address to all the Colored Citizens of the United States (Philadelphia: King and Baird, 1846), 19. Some African American leaders had begun advocating the utility of manual labor schools at least as early as the 1833 Negro Convention. See Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., Exodus! Religion, Race & Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 126. See also Howard H. Bell, "National Negro Conventions of the Middle 1840's: Moral Suasion vs. Political Action," Journal of Negro History 42 (1957), 247.
12. Gayle T. Tate, "Free Black Resistance in the Antebellum Era, 1830 to 1860," Journal of Black Studies 28 (1998), 770.
17. Lovejoy ran an abolitionist newspaper. Anti-abolitionist opponents threw his printing apparatus into the river on more than one occasion. On the final occasion, they killed Lovejoy in the process. In the historiography of press freedom, Lovejoy is often presented as a heroic figure. See Merton L. Dillon, Elijah P. Lovejoy, Abolitionist Editor (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961) passim; and Edwin Scott Gaustad, A Religious History of America, New Revised Ed., (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1990), 165-66.
18. John C. Edwards, "Communication from the Governor of the State of Missouri," in Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of Missouri of the First Session of the Fourteenth General Assembly (Jefferson City, MO: James Lusk, Printer to the State, 1847), 194.
19. Laws of the State of Missouri Passed at the First Session of the Fourteenth General Assembly (City of Jefferson: James Lusk Public Printer, 1847), 103-104. The statute continues: "3. All meetings of negroes or mulattoes, for the purposes mentioned in the two preceding sections, shall be considered unlawful assemblages, and shall be suppressed by sheriffs, constables, and other public officers." On the complex history of the term "mulatto," which denotes a group that comprised more than half the black populace in Illinois and made up roughly one sixth of the slave populace of Missouri by this time, see Joel Williamson, New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 24-33, 57-59.
20. Lorenzo J. Greene, et. al., eds., Missouri's Black Heritage, rev. ed. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993), 62-64.
22. In "The Narrative of William Wells Brown," specific instances of cruelty to slaves are described in some detail. In this 1847 narrative, Brown observed, "Though slavery is thought, by some, to be mild in Missouri, when compared with the cotton, sugar and rice growing States, yet no part of our slave-holding country, is more noted for the barbarity of its inhabitants, than St. Louis. It was here that Col. Harney, a United States officer, whipped a slave woman to death. It was here that Francis McIntosh, a free colored man from Pittsburgh, was taken from the steamboat Flora, and burned at the stake. During a residence of eight years in this city, numerous cases of extreme cruelty came under my own observation;--to record them all, would occupy more space than could possibly be allowed in this little volume." William L. Andrews and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds. Slave Narratives, Library of America (New York: Library Classics, 2000), 383.
23. The words of slaves and former slaves could be cited in abundance to buttress this point. I offer here just two illustrative examples: Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington. When Douglass as a child overheard his master rebuke his mistress for teaching him the alphabet, it dawned on him that this forced ignorance was at the core of the thralldom of slavery. As an adult he reflected back upon the impact of this revelation on his determination as a youth to teach himself to read: "I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty-to wit, the white man's power to enslave the black man . . . . From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom." Published just two years before the Missouri legislation, Douglass's treatise offers a window into the fear of slave-state whites, and conversely the aspirations of slaves, regarding literacy. A generation later, Booker T. Washington, as a small child during the final years of slavery, had envied children who received a formal education, and expressed as much in the following poignant terms: "The picture of several dozen boys and girls in a schoolroom engaged in study made a deep impression upon me, and I had the feeling that to get into a schoolhouse and study in this way would be about the same as getting into paradise." A generation later, Booker T. Washington, as a small child during the final years of slavery, had envied children who received a formal education, and expressed as much in the following poignant terms: "The picture of several dozen boys and girls in a schoolroom engaged in study made a deep impression upon me, and I had the feeling that to get into a schoolhouse and study in this way would be about the same as getting into paradise." Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, ed. David W. Blight, Bedford Series in History and Culture (Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press: Boston, 1993 [1845]), 58; Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery, Signet Classic Edition (New York: Penguin, 2000 [1901]), 5.
25. Andrews & Gates, eds., Slave Narratives, 383.
26. Gosebrink and O'Connor, 2.
27. Edwin J. Benton, "A History of Public Education in Missouri, 1760-1964" (Ph.D. diss., St. Louis University, 1965), 51.
28. Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York: Pantheon, 1974), 143, 136.
32. Moses Roper, Narrative of My Escape from Slavery (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003 [republication of the 1837 edition]), 5-19.
33. Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 113.
35. Patrick Rael, "Black Theodicy: African-Americans and Nationalism in the Antebellum North," The North Star: A Journal of African American Religious History 3:2 (Spring, 2000), 7. Http://northstar.vassar.edu/volume3/rael.html.
36. Joanne Pope Melish, "The 'Condition' Debate and Racial Discourse in the Antebellum North," Journal of the Early Republic 19 (Winter 1999), 669.
37. Richard Newman, Patrick Rael, and Phillip Lapansky, eds., Pamphlets of Protest: An Anthology of Early African American Protest Literature, 1790-1860 (New York: Routlege, 2001), 85. This recent work is the best anthology, to my knowledge, of antebellum protest literature written by African Americans.
40. For the religious dimensions of this uprooting, see Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 129-63; for an analysis giving greater weight to the agency of slaves in their own religious formation in their creative blending of Christian and African elements, see Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 3-97.
41. See Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 243-66.
42. Albert J. Raboteau, "'Ethiopia Shall Soon Stretch Forth Her Hands': Black Destiny in Nineteenth-Century America" in his Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African-American Religious History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 42-43.
43. John Berry Meachum, An Address to all the Colored Citizens of the United States (Philadelphia: King and Baird, 1846), 60.
44. Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease, "Negro Conventions and the Problem of Black Leadership," Journal of Black Studies 2 (1971), 30. On the nuanced cluster of meanings attached to the rhetoric of "nationhood," see Glaude, 63-81. For an alternative, though in many ways overlapping, analysis of black leadership, see Vincent Bakpetu Thompson, "Leadership in the African Diaspora in the Americas Prior to 1860," Journal of Black Studies 24 (1993), 42-76.
47. This was a common theme of the Negro conventions. For example, in his address at the convention in Buffalo, New York in 1843, Samuel H. Davis stated: "We also wish to secure, for our children especially, the benefits of education, which, in several States are entirely denied us, and in others are enjoyed only in name." Minutes of the National Convention of Colored Citizens: Held at Buffalo, on the 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th of August, 1843, for the Purpose of Considering their Moral and Political Condition as American Citizens (New York: Piercy & Reed, 1843) 5; reprinted in Howard H. Bell, ed., Minutes of the Proceedings of the National Negro Conventions 1830-1864, The American Negro: His History and Literature (New York: Arno Press, 1969).
48. Cleophus J. LaRue points out the role of black preaching in addressing social concerns from a position within the black community, both today and in the past: "Many African Americans believe that matters of vital importance in black life are best dealt with by other blacks, for example, issues such as teen-aged pregnancy, exhortations to blacks to lift themselves from the welfare rolls, black on black crime, and calls for educational excellence. They are convinced that some things can best be said to blacks by other blacks. More pointedly, there are some things that should only be said to blacks by other blacks. Issues and concerns that fall within this realm have historically been addressed from black pulpits." Cleophus J. LaRue, The Heart of Black Preaching (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2000), 24.
50. Bell, "National Negro Conventions," 247-60.
52. On this point Meachum's position may be both compared and contrasted with that of William Lloyd Garrison, a white Quaker and the chief proponent of non-violent moral suasionism within the ranks of the abolitionist movement. Garrison was an especially powerful and uncompromising figure in his demands for abolition, but seemed somewhat naïve about how threatening his views would be to white slaveholders, or how violence and warfare would come into play in defense of an inherently violent institution. In Garrison's "Address to the Slaves of the United States" on June 2, 1845, he had urged, in a rather paternalistic manner, that: "The weapons with which the abolitionists seek to effect your deliverance are not bowie knives, pistols, swords, guns, or any other deadly implements. They consist of appeals, warnings, rebukes, arguments and facts, addressed to the understandings, consciences and hearts of the people. Many of your friends believe that not even those who are oppressed, whether their skins are white or black, can shed the blood of their oppressors in accordance with the will of God; while many others believe that it is right for the oppressed to rise and take their liberty by violence, if they can secure it in no other manner; but they, in common with all your friends, believe that every attempt at insurrection would be attended with disaster and defeat, on your part, because you are not strong enough to contend with the military power of the nation; consequently, their advice to you is, to be patient, long-suffering, and submissive, yet awhile longer-trusting that, by the blessing of the Most High on their labors, you will yet be emancipated without shedding a drop of your masters' blood, or losing a drop of your own." William Lloyd Garrison, "Address to the Slaves of the United States," in William Lloyd Garrison and the Fight against Slavery: Selections from The Liberator, ed. William E. Cain (New York: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press, 1995), 111; see also William Lloyd Garrison, Selections from the Writings and Speeches of William Lloyd Garrison (1852; reprint, New York: Negro Universities Press, 1968) 59, 65, 163-73.
53. On the importance of agency as a category in the study of antebellum African American experience, see also Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood, Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), x-xi.
54. See Pease and Pease, 29-44; see also Philip S. Foner and George E. Walker, eds., Proceedings of the Black State Conventions, vol. 1, New York, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979), 1:xiv-xv.
57. See the excellent essay by Albert Raboteau, "African-Americans, Exodus, and the American Israel," in African-American Christianity: Essays in History, ed. Paul E. Johnson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 1-17.
59. Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion, translated by Ephraim Fischoff (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), 46.
60. Lamentations 1:1-22; Jeremiah 20:7-18; Isaiah 44:1-5, 21-28; cf. 54:1-8.
64. Weber, 55. Weber identifies Muhammed and Zoroaster as instances of the former, and Buddha as an instance of the latter type of prophet.
66. Weber, 48. Weber remarked that: "The Christian prophet was enjoined to live by the labor of his own hands or, as among the Buddhists, only from alms which he had not specifically solicited. These injunctions were repeatedly emphasized in the Pauline epistles, and in another form, in the Buddhist monastic regulations. The dictum 'whosoever will not work, shall not eat' applied to missionaries, and it constitutes one of the chief mysteries of the success of prophetic propaganda itself."
68. "SUDDEN DEATH OF A COLORED PREACHER," Obituary of John Berry Meachum, Daily Missouri Democrat, vol. 3, no. 47, February 21, 1854, n.p.
69. "St. Louis Historic Context: The African American Experience" website, http://stlouis.missouri.org/government/heritage/history/afriamer.htm.
70. An excellent starting point for examining the controversies is Jan Miller, "Annotated Bibliography of the Washington-Du Bois Controversy," Journal of Black Studies 25 (1994), 250-72; but see the highly critical rhetoric directed at Washington by Donald Spivey, Schooling for the New Slavery: Black Industrial Education, 1868-1915, Contributions in Afro-American and African Studies, 38 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1978), 45-108.
71. In arguing for industrial education to undergird more abstract forms of higher learning, Washington's rhetoric clearly echoes themes found in Meachum: "Patiently, quietly, doggedly, persistently, through summer and winter, sunshine and shadow, by self-sacrifice, by foresight, by honesty and industry, we must re-enforce arguments with results. One farm bought, one house built, one home sweetly and intelligently kept, one man who is the largest tax payer or has the largest bank account, one school or church maintained, one factory running successfully, one truck garden profitably cultivated, one patient cured by a Negro doctor, one sermon well-preached, one office well-filled, one life cleanly lived-these will tell more in our favor than all the abstract eloquence that can be summoned to plead our cause. Our pathway must be up through the soil, up through swamps, up through forests, up through the streams, the rocks, up through commerce, education and religion!" Booker T. Washington, "Industrial Education for the Negro," in The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative American Negroes of To-day (New York: AMS Press, 1903), 28-29. Reprint ed., 1970. To trace the history of the struggle to improve black education, north and south, pre-and post-Civil War, see: Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1961), 113-52; W. A. Low, "The Education of Negroes Viewed Historically," in Negro Education in America: its Adequacy, Problems and Needs, edited by Virgil A. Clift, et. al. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1962), 27-59; Jacqueline Jones, Soldiers of Light and Love: Northern Teachers and Georgia Blacks, 1865-1873 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1980), 59-66; C. Stuart McGehee, "E.O. Tade, Freedmen's Education, and the Failure of Reconstruction in Tennessee," Tennessee Historical Quarterly 43 (1984), 376-89; Patrick J. Huber and Gary R. Kremer, "Nathaniel C. Bruce, Black Education, and the 'Tuskegee of the Midwest'" Missouri Historical Review 86 (1991), 37-54; and Kenrick Ian Grandison, "Negotiated Space: The Black College Campus as a Cultural Record of Postbellum America," American Quarterly 51 (1999), 529-79.
72. My thanks to Karen Jameson and Chris Crain for providing a helpful brochure on the "Freedom School" of University City, Missouri.
74. Theologian James H. Cone has argued that these two streams in African American intellectual history are not as polarized as they are often made to appear. See James H. Cone, Martin & Malcolm & America: Dream or Nightmare (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991), 1-19; 244-71.