... having been breathed out

In the 1820s, the American Colonization Society [which advocated deporting American Blacks to the newly-established US colony Liberia] grew into the preeminent race-relations reform organization in the United States. [Thomas] Jefferson was again endorsing colonization, and calculating segregationists were beginning to see it as a solution to Black resistance. Altruistic assimilationists figured that it was a way to develop Black people in both America and Africa. In 1825, a twenty-eight-year-old Yale alumnus, Ralph Gurley, became the new ACS secretary. He held the position until his death in 1872, while also serving twice as the chaplain of the House of Representatives. Gurley had a vision: he believed that to win the minds and souls of Americans to the colonization cause, it had to be linked to the Protestant movement. His timing was good, because the Second Great Awakening was at hand as he began his ACS post.

The American Bible Society, the American Sunday School Union, and the American Tract Society were all established in this period, and they each used the printing press to besiege the nation with Bibles, tracts, and picture cards that would help to create a strong, unified, Jesus-centered national identity. A good tract "should be entertaining," announced the American Tract Society in 1824. "There must be something to allure the listless to read." Allurement—those pictures of holy figures—had long been considered a sinful trick of Satan and "devilish" Catholics. No more. Protestant organizations started mass-producing, mass-marketing, and mass-distributing images of Jesus, who was always depicted as White. Protestants saw all the aspirations of the new American identity in the White Jesus—a racist idea that proved to be in their cultural self-interest. As pictures of this White Jesus started to appear, Blacks and Whites started to make connections, consciously and unconsciously, between the White God the Father, his White son Jesus, and the power and perfection of White people. "I really believed my old master was almighty God," runaway Henry Brown admitted, "and that his son, my young master, was Jesus Christ."

As the revived Protestant movement ignited the enthusiasm of students, professors, clergymen, merchants, and legislators in New England, the American Colonization Society drew more people into its fold. While southern colonizationists sought to remove free Blacks, northerns sought to remove all Blacks, enslaved and freed. Northern race relations had grown progressively worse since the 1790s, defying uplift suasion. Each uplifting step of Black people stoked animosity, and runaways stoked further animosity. Race riots embroiled New York City, New Haven, Boston, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh in the 1820s. As racial tensions accumulated, the ACS continued to gain adherents to the cause. Its agents argued forcefully that White prejudice and Black slavery would be eternal, and that freed Blacks must use the talents they had acquired from Whites to go back and redeem unenlightened Africa. By 1832, every northern state legislature had passed resolutions of endorsement for the colonization idea.

Free Blacks remained overwhelmingly against colonization. Their resistance to the concept partly accounted for the identifier "Negro" replacing "African" in common usage in the 1820s. Free Blacks theorized that if they called themselves "African," they would be giving credence to the notion that they should be sent back to Africa. Their own racist ideas were also behind the shift in terminology. They considered Africa and its cultural practices to be backward, having accepted racist notions of the continent. Some light-skinned Blacks preferred "colored," to separate themselves from dark-skinned Negroes or Africans.

Rejecting her sinful past could not preserve her from the danger of backsliding in the future, however. [Her companion] Sylvia [Drake]’s presence beside her every evening in bed over the next forty years presented temptations that were too powerful to overcome. Like many sinners who had been reborn, Charity [Bryant] struggled with her besetting sins for the rest of her days. In the final decade of her life, Charity wrote Sylvia a poem that described her private challenge. A person, she wrote, must fight:

… the secret cherished sin
The poison serpent’s tooth
The treacherous clam that lurks within
Destroying age + youth.

[…] The secret sin, in the language of the time, was a common euphemism for masturbation. Martin Luther himself had once called masturbation the secret sin. In the early nineteenth century, this corrupt practice or secret vice because an obsession within the American medical establishment. Leading doctors argued that masturbation was the primary cause of disease among American youth, leading to consumption, blindness, insanity, and even death. Notably, a close reading of anti-masturbation texts reveals that what early nineteenth-century doctors called masturbation among girls, we might call lesbian sex today. The secret vice, according to the authorities, was a sin that girls taught to each other and frequently practiced together for maximum titillation.

Evidence of lesbian ‘bosom sex’ practices in the early nineteenth century have been preserved in the rare correspondence of two African-American female lovers, schoolteacher Rebecca Primus and domestic servant Addie Brown. Separated by work, Brown wrote to Primus informing her that at the boarding school where Brown worked in service, several women sought to share her bed at night and fondle her breasts. Brown placated Primus that 'I shall try to keep your f[avored] one always for you,’ but added 'should in my excitement forget you will pardon me I know.’ When Primus apparently did not forgive her this excitement, but expressed jealousy over the thought of other women touching Brown’s breasts, Brown backtracked. In her next letter Brown promised that when she slept with another woman 'I can’t say that I injoyed it very much,’ and she denied recollecting what she had meant by the word 'excitement’ in her previous letter. The exchange paints a vivid picture of a self-consciously sexual culture of breast play among women educators and school workers in the antebellum era.

Although it is often assumed that the “closet” is an opaque space, meaning that people who are in the closet keep others in total ignorance about their sexuality, often the closet is really an open secret. The ignorance that defines the closet is as likely to be a carefully constructed edifice as it is to be a total absence of knowledge. The closet depends on people strategically choosing to remain ignorant of inconvenient facts. In this light, Charity [Bryant] and Sylvia [Drake]’s acceptance within their [early 19th-century Vermont] town should be understood as the result of their success in persuading others to choose ignorance by not asking questions about their sexuality. No matter what the answer, the very act of being questioned would have damaged the women’s respectability.

The open closet is an especially critical strategy in small towns, where every person serves a role, and which would cease to function if all moral transgressors were ostracized. Small communities can maintain the fiction of ignorance in order to preserve social arrangements that work for the general benefit. Queer history has often focused on the modern city as the most potent site of gay liberation, since its anonymity and living arrangements for single people permitted same-sex-desiring men and women to form innovative communities. More recognition needs to be given to the distinctive opportunities that rural towns allowed for the expression of same-sex sexuality. For early American women in particular, the rural landscape rather than the city served as a critical milieu for establishing same-sex unions. Women of Charity and Sylvia’s [post-Revolutionary] generation spoke far more often of their desire to retire together to a little cottage in the countryside, than of their urge to move together to the city.