Mulatto America : At the Crossroads of Black and White Culture: A Social History

Black and white culture has been blending and colliding in America for hundreds of years. In the 1700s, black slaves discovered their masters' Bibles and found in them a seditious faith of their own. In the 1920s, young white men fell in love with New Orleans jazz and created an underground of cultural dissidents. In the 1970s, black style began its takeover of the sports world and made Dr. J and Michael Jordan the idols of millions. Drawing on original research and daring new interpretations of crucial events in American history, author Stephan Talty paints a portrait of a lost America: one in which musicians, writers, and ordinary people led the nation to a deeper understanding of the strangers on the other side of town.

Mulatto America
At the Crossroads of Black and White Culture: A Social History

Chapter One

The Lost History of the White Slave

As evening fell, the prow of the Brooklyn ferry cut through the dark surface of the East River, its waters whipped by an ice-tipped October wind. The instant the boat touched the foot of Wall Street, Henry Ward Beecher strode off and headed uptown. Hurrying through the jostling crowds, the young preacher fought to stay alert. He had been working long hours to build his Brooklyn Heights congregation, and had recently auctioned off the pews in his Plymouth church for the princely sum of $8500. Beecher's merchant parishioners were as devout as they were eager for pride of place in New York's most fashionable church. He was deeply satisfied by the response and the fresh cash for his ministry. But tonight's event, also an auction, would be far trickier.

In 1848, the 36-year-old Beecher was not yet the most famous religious spokesman of the century, "as much an embodiment of nineteenth century America as Walt Whitman," as he would accurately be called. That would come within a few years, but his influence was growing rapidly. A politician in vestments, the spokesman for a thriving American middle class, a brilliant cliché maker, and an egotist, Beecher was fighting his way out of the shadows of his famous father and eleven accomplished siblings by leading his flock away from his progenitor's steely Calvinism toward a more liberal Protestantism. And tonight at Manhattan's Broadway Tabernacle, he would again confront the most vexing social question that had nagged at him throughout his rise to prominence and would begin to tip him into unheard-of national fame: slavery. The auction he was hurrying to was of not of pews but of two human beings -- light-skinned mulattos known as the Edmonson sisters.

The daughters of a slave mother and a white father, the Edmonsons had been offered for sale to a slave dealer for "exportation to New Orleans and the markets," but they had escaped to a northern-bound schooner and found their way to New York. Their case had been written up in the local newspapers, and tonight they would be the center of an anti-slavery auction, where Beecher would try to raise the slave owners' ransom price (around $2000) and buy their freedom.

The preacher had equivocated on slavery for years, much to the disgust of the still-marginalized abolitionist movement. Though he would come to be considered a radical by mainstream America, his stance was shot through with moral evasions. Slavery was wrong, Beecher believed, but it was inextricably bound up in the Union; therefore it could not be ended immediately, as William Lloyd Garrison and the other abolitionists were demanding. In fact, Beecher believed it would be literally "ages" before slavery died a slow, natural death. His view represented the opinion of most liberal-minded Americans -- that is, if they gave any thought to the issue at all.

On arriving at the crowded Broadway Tabernacle, the preacher climbed to the podium; he would, as usual, be the center of attention, serving as auctioneer. He looked out on the eager faces of the Christian burghers and their wives, then called the Edmonson sisters to the front and began the proceedings. "A sale by a human flesh dealer of Christian girls!" Beecher cried. Painting scenes as "lurid as a Rembrandt," he enumerated the cruelties the girls would face on the plantation -- lashings, endless work under a blazing sun, rape (Beecher paid special attention to the girls' virginity and the certainty of their rape). The preacher played his part with an enthusiasm that surprised even him; later he bragged that he would have made "a capital auctioneer." He explained that the Edmonson sisters had accepted their immortal Redeemer, but if sold into the jungle of the South, they would be brutalized, de-Christianized, de-souled.

A masterful preacher, perhaps the greatest of his century, Beecher outdid himself that night. "Of all the meetings I have attended in my life," said the reverend, who would attend thousands, "for a panic of sympathy I never saw one that surpassed that." Women wailed, grew hysterical; descriptions of later Beecher auctions detailed how female audience members tore off their jewelry -- rings, bracelets, brooches -- and piled them in the collection plates that passed through the crowd. Men's hands trembled as they tore the money out of their pocketbooks or unhooked their gold watches. There was a kind of intoxication of the spirit, a bonding with the fate of the slaves that was unusual for the times.

Beecher, too, was moved, in his own way. Later, his biographer Paxton Hibben would write that the fact that the girls were Methodists had made him see the entire subject of slavery differently. But that is an evasion: Many, if not most, slaves in the mid-1800s were at least nominally Christian. Something else was at work. Hibben phrased it as a question confronting Beecher: "Shall this girl -- almost as white as you are -- be sold for money to the first comer to do as he likes with?" The answer had to be no. Beecher believed strongly that Africans did not have the same inborn love of freedom that whites did; mulattos, on the other hand, inherited some of that liberty-loving spirit through their European heritage -- a transfusion of values, if you will, through a transfusion of blood. The Edmonsons' Anglo-Saxon bloodlines made them no longer appear as doomed heathens, and empathy surged through Beecher as the congregation shouted. "He sees all of this," says Hibben, re-creating the scene, "as if he were an actor in it, himself. It is more real to him than the crowded church filled with sobbing ... women."

The auction exceeded all expectations: $2200 was raised, enough to free the two girls, and the next morning, the newspapers were full of accounts from the Tabernacle. In the following years, Beecher grew more vocal, pressing the issue. And he staged more auctions, which grew into notorious passion plays of redemption, sexual purity, and emotionalism ...

Mulatto America
At the Crossroads of Black and White Culture: A Social History. Copyright © by Stephan Talty. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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Excerpted from Mulatto America: At the Crossroads of Black and White Culture: A Social History by Stephan Talty
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