Abolitionists, including white ones, called out the absurdity of opposing class feudalism only to support racial feudalism. The watch phrase here, deployed hundreds of times in William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator and by Frederick Douglass after his break with Garrison, was “the aristocracy of skin.”
The difference between the anti-feudalism of the Founding Fathers and the anti-feudalism of the black liberals was ideology. Racial feudalism was sustained by a constellation of ideas naturalizing a racial order, and enforcing norms of racial fealty and racial honor. These all, of course, have feudal analogs. A racial order of whites over blacks was cast into theological and scientific terms, so that the social hierarchy felt organic and inevitable. Racial honor pressured whites to defend their superior positions over blacks with the same thick moral sensitivity observed in other honor cultures. And racial fealty encouraged blacks to accept their subservient roles in moral terms.
To understand the nature of their oppression, black liberals had to interrogate and critique American ideology from their own perspective. Black liberal philosopher Hosea Easton described how this ideology pervaded white society and propagated itself.
[T]here could be nothing more natural, than for a slaveholding nation to indulge in a train of thoughts and conclusions that favored their idol, slavery. It becomes the interest of all parties, not excepting the clergy, to sanction the premises, and draw the conclusions, and hence, to teach the rising generation.
Liberalism in Europe developed explicitly against the feudal order. Liberals above all else targeted privileges of monarchs, nobles, and the clergy for elimination. The third estate was to be liberated from servitude. Liberalism in the American context then would seem to require liberation of the slave class—blacks—from the gentry—whites.
Black liberalism
Roy distills black liberalism from the slave narratives, abolitionist speeches and writings, and political actions of several central figures. These include figures still celebrated today, like Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Harriet Jacobs, and David Walker, as well as figures that have fallen away from the (white liberal) canon, such as Hosea Easton, James McCune Smith, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and William Wells Brown. These and other black American public thinkers in the early 19th century had a range of views on specific issues, but they were united in a recognizably liberal ideology aspiring to complete the Founders’ ideals of individual freedom, equality, reason, representative government, and progress. (As a terminological aside, Roy dismisses any fussiness over “republicanism” versus “liberalism,” finding that the terms in the American context are “fundamentally imbricated.”)