To Heal the Scourge of Prejudice: The Life and Writings of Hosea Easton

Abstract

To Heal the Scourge of Prejudice: The Life and Writings of Hosea Easton. Edited by George R. Price and James Brewer Stewart. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999. Pp. 123. Illustrations. Cloth, $30.00, paper, $14.95.) Thanks to the efforts of George R. Price and James Brewer Stewart, the writings of Hosea Easton, a fundamental voice during one of the darkest periods of chattel slavery in America, are once again easily available to the public. The book includes the only extended writings of Hosea Easton that have survived, including the text of his 1828 Thanksgiving address in Providence, Rhode Island, and his 1837 treatise on the African-American condition. Price and Stewart provide an excellent introduction to the selections, reviewing the events that shaped Hosea Easton's world. The introduction masterfully combines elements of biography, politics, and social history and is an effective overview of race relations in the United States during the 1820s and 1830s. By placing Easton's life in the context of the nation's developing racial crisis after the Missouri Compromise, the editors effectively make the case for his importance to African-American thought, the history of abolitionism, and our continuing struggles with race in America. Born on September 1, 1798, Hosea Easton was the youngest of eight children. James Easton, Hosea's father, had a profound and lasting impact over his children. He believed that temperance, piety, thrift, self-control, and above all, education provided the keys to liberation (7). These values formed the core of James's doctrine of personal uplift, and his idealism provided the initial prism through which Hosea viewed race relations in America. Price and Stewart remind us that behind the concept . . . lay the seldom-questioned assumption that in order to achieve equality mixed people of color must subdue their cultural distinctiveness to conform to Anglo-American norms (7-8). Such a philosophy may seem limiting, but Hosea Easton adopted this line of thought to oppose the efforts of colonization societies in the 1820s. By fashioning himself as wholly American, by which he meant Protestant, capitalist, and republican, Easton hoped to repudiate the idea that African Americans should be returned to Africa. Personal uplift provided a means by which African Americans became agents of their own liberation, and this hopeful message inspired Easton's 1828 Thanksgiving address. Aside from calls forrespectability, the address issued a stunning rebuke of white racism. Easton's frustration over the gulf between revolutionary principles and the reality of AfricanAmerican life is palpable on almost every page, yet he maintained that African Americans needed to renew their efforts toward respectability to achieve liberation. Price and Stewart do not exaggerate when they claim it is hard to imagine a historical document that captures more fully the complexity and power of the ideology of African American `uplift'(10). During the 1830s, race relations deteriorated, owing to the split in the abolitionist movement. Price and Stewart expertly review the unfolding tragedy and its effects upon Hosea Easton's thought. By the time of his early death in 1837, Easton had abandoned his father's ideas of uplift in favor of a radically new approach. His Treatise on the Intellectual Character, and Civil and Political Condition of the Colored People of the U. States provided a systematic treatment of race and slavery in which Christian environmentalism became Easton's defining doctrine. …