The American Slave’s Plea to Mankind: An Address Delivered in Syracuse, New York, on May 7, 1851
THE AMERICAN SLAVE’S PLEA TO MANKIND: AN ADDRESS
DELIVERED IN SYRACUSE, NEW YORK, ON 7 MAY 1851
Liberator, 23 May 1851 and New York Daily Tribune, 10 May 1851. Other texts in New
York Herald, 9 May 1851; National Anti-Slavery Standard, 15 May 1851; Pennsylvania
Freeman, 15 May 1851; Anti-Slavery Bugle, 31 May 1851.
Unable to secure a meeting place in New York City, the American Anti-
Slavery Society reluctantly broke with tradition in 1851 and scheduled its
annual meeting in Syracuse. The recent speaking tour of visiting British
abolitionist George Thompson had roused antislavery forces throughout cen-
tral New York, and Garrison anticipated “crowded and thrilling” meetings at
Syracuse despite the absence of many delegates from the eastern seaboard.
When the convention assembled on 7 May, Garrison’s expectations were fully
realized. Western delegates flocked to the meeting in large numbers and
attendance was further swelled by Gerrit Smith, William Goodell, and other
political abolitionists who came to welcome their former allies and watch the
proceedings. No doubt partly out of courtesy to George Thompson, “old”
and “new organizationists” maintained a surprising show of outward har-
mony throughout the meetings. For Douglass, however, the Syracuse conven-
tion marked a major philosophical turning point and signaled the beginning
of his open breach with the Garrisonians. In the course of the three-day gather-
ing Douglass spoke several times. His first speech, delivered on 7 May in
support of resolutions praising George Thompson, is the one reprinted here.
Two days later, with Garrison in the chair, Douglass shocked the meeting by
admitting publicly that he no longer viewed the U.S. Constitution as a pro-
slavery document. According to Samuel J. May, Douglass announced his new
position in a “hesitating and embarrassed" manner. For the rest of the meet-
ing he was understandably off balance and seemed to lack his “usual ease and
self-possession.” Garrison to Abby Kelley Foster, 6 April 1851, in Merrill
and Ruchames, Garrison Letters, 4: 56; Lib., 16 May 1851; NASS, 29 May
1851; Benjamin Quarles, “The Breach Between Douglass and Garrison,”
JNH, 23: 144-54 (January 1938).
FREDERICK DOUGLASS next addressed the Convention. He said, I have
snatched this opportunity to say a few words, because I fear that I shall not
have another, if we are permitted to discuss these resolutions long. I desire
to say a word in commendation not merely of him whose presence here is its
own commendation, but of the friends of humanity in England, to whom
reference is made in the resolutions.1Douglass refers to George Thompson and to the resolution offered by Samuel J. May stating “That this Society would tender to the true-hearted Abolitionists of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, as well as to those who are in the British Possessions on this Continent, their warmest gratitude for their co-operation in the great work of Emancipation." In 1847, the officers of the American and Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Societies had extended an invitation to Thompson to visit the United States on a second tour. In its 1850 Annual Report, the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society announced that Thompson, “in compliance with cordial invitations extended to him from time to time for years past, by this Society and by Abolitionists in various parts of the country, has intimated his intention of paying this country a visit, in the course ofthe ensuing summer." Thompson set sail for the United States on 19 October 1850 and remained eight months. ASB, 24 May 1851; Maria Weston Chapman to J. B. Estlin, 28 February 1847, George Thompson to Garrison, 3 October 1850, in Taylor, ed., British and American Abolitionists, 307, 348; Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, Eighteenth Annual Report (Boston, 1850). 64-65; Temperley, British Antislavery, 238. I feel that, as Abolitionists, we are
profoundly indebted to the Abolitionists of England, Ireland and Scotland
for the many efficient testimonies borne by them, from time to time,
against the system of American Slavery. In this connection I may remark,
that I am aware that there are a great many people in this country, good
people too, who are averse to what they call foreign interference, and who
affirm that the American people are themselves capable of managing the
whole question of Slavery; and that interference from abroad, moreover,
tends to retard, rather than to hasten, success. They say that it is impudent
and insolent for a foreigner, no way identified with our institutions, to
interfere with these institutions, and that all such interference should be
rebuked, and must be a failure in every respect.
Now, I think that we, as a nation, have no right to claim exemption
from criticism from abroad. I maintain we have no right to claim that this
question of American Slavery is a question upon which, and with which we
have every thing to do, and no one else has any thing to do. We cannot
make this our own question alone: it belongs to the whole human family.
(Loud cheers.) We have three millions of people in this land, utterly dead in
the estimation of all our religious institutions; they are unknown to our
Missionary, Tract, Bible or Temperance Societies, and their condition is
never by them referred to. They are placed beyond the pale of all philan-
thropic movements in this country, except those of Abolitionists who have
identified themselves with them. The American nation has thrust upon the
whole world the work of redressing the wrongs of these millions. If it is in
bad taste for the foreigner to interfere with American institutions, Ameri-
cans may thank themselves for this interference. (Loud cheers.)
By casting out the blacks from the sympathies of this country, from
their benevolent regard, and from their institutions for the improvement of
mankind, they have presented them to the world, civilized and savage, to
take up their cause and plead for them. George Thompson was invited to
this country by a larger number than ever before invited any man to this
land. He was invited by three millions of people. There was no letter sent,
there were no voices heard; the death-like silence throughout the South, in
regard to the groans and tears of the down-trodden millions, welcomed him
with an eloquence which could never be transferred to paper. (Applause)
He comes here to pour out his soul in their behalf. His constituency, it is
said, desire him at home. His constituency is here. The Tower Hamlets
want him at home;2In 1847 George Thompson had been elected to Parliament by Tower Hamlets, one of the largest boroughs in England. Lib., 6, 27 August 1847; Temperley, British Antislavery, 238. the slave prisons of New Orleans, the shambles at
Vicksburg, the whipping posts and dungeons call more loudly for him to
remain here, than any call from the Tower Hamlets. (Loud cheers.)
He is wanted here, and here, if I could persuade him, he would make
his home. He would do more for humanity here, than I believe he could do
even at home. He could do here, for his constituency in England, what he
could not do at home. Who is there that does not know that the grand
obstruction to popular freedom in England, is the system of Slavery in this
country? It is an argument opposed to the reformers of England, against
almost every reform that is urged. What argument more potential against
Reform in England, than to point to American Slavery here, and assert that
our free institutions are a failure? When we speak of the United States, and
praise its institutions, how are our assertions met in England? We are told
that we commence by saying that all men are born free and equal, and yet
we live in a land in which every sixth man, woman, and child is a slave.
When they speak of the equal rights of this country and its freedom, we are
told that there is no respect for human rights in the United States, and that
the veriest tyrants that have ever cursed the earth are the men whom the
Democrats, the Reformers of England, are desirous to imitate. For we must
remember, that, although England has its laws of primogeniture, its al-
liance of Church with State, yet it has no Slavery. Although it has rags and
poverty, it has no Slavery. With the example of the United States, the
opponents of Reform in England are able to baffle, if not put down, the
reformatory movements in England. I look upon American Slavery as
the grand obstruction to progress throughout the world, and a blow dealt
for the destruction of Slavery, will be a blow dealt in behalf of human
freedom throughout the world. (Great cheers.)
Get American slavery out of the way, and freedom throughout the
world will be revived; get Slavery out of this country, and it will become
what it has long professed to be—the beacon light of liberty to all who have
struggled for equal rights throughout the world. Now, this matter of Slav-
ery is a matter with which not only Americans have to deal, but one with
which all mankind may rightfully have something to do; and I rejoice to
know that England and Englishmen are not disposed to hold their tongues,
although they are bidden so to do by the people of the United States.
Mr. Douglass then referred to the opinions of Christian bodies in
England with respect to Slavery. Years ago, such men as Dr. Cox were
welcomed in British pulpits, and received every where with consideration;
but the instructions under which the churches of England had been put by
such men as Wm. Lloyd Garrison and George Thompson had much
changed their sentiments, and they had resolved to exclude such men.
(I have recently read with pleasure that the English clergy have refused
for the future to give the hand of fellowship to the slaveholder, and at the
World’s Fair will treat the clerical advocate of and apologist for the Fugi-
tive Slave Law as he ought to be treated.3On 1 May 1851 Queen Victoria officially opened the Great Exhibition, an international exposition of industry and the arts. Housed in the Crystal Palace, a spectacular nineteen-acre glass structure erected in London's Hyde Park, the exhibition attracted over six million visitors before it closed in October. In anticipation of the American visitors, among whom would be many “slaveholders, or their abettors” planning to attend the annual meetings of philanthropic and religious organizations, the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in April called upon British clergymen to “take such steps as shall effectively prevent all parties implicated in the support of slavery in the United States, from access to your pulpits, and to the fellowship of your churches.” The ministers of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Congregational Union and Home Union, extending the principle to laymen, resolved to have “[n]o alliance with the men who rank such spirits as Frederick Douglass— spirits whose wisdom would teach sages, and whose eloquence would charm senates,—with goods and chattels, and put them up for sale on the auction block!” Provoked by the passage and execution of the Fugitive Slave Law, “a wicked and accursed statute . . . to which no one who would obey God rather than man can consistently or righteously submit," many county associations, groups of ministers, and individual churches passed similar resolutions. The Evangelical Alliance voted not to admit slaveholders to their upcoming conference; the Baptist Union renewed its vow unequivocally to “show that British Christians cherish an imperishable hatred towards slavery"; and the Congregational Union of England and Wales declared that “the sin of man stealing . . . raises an insuperable barrier to church fellowship” with American clergymen “who have given either direct countenance or tacit support to the Fugitive Slave Law.” BFASR, 2d ser., 6: 67-70, 76-77, 90, 94-95, 105-06, 130 (1 May, 2 June. 1 July, 1 August 1851); NASS, 24 July 1851; Abel and Klingberg, Side-Light on Anglo-American Relations, 262-63; Robert F. Dalzell, Jr., American Participation in the Great Exhibition of 1851 (Amherst, Mass, 1960); Yvonne French, The Great Exhibition: 1851 (London, 1951); Robert Stephenson, The Great Exhibition; Its Palace, and Its Principal Contents (London, 1851). In America, the clergymen who
have bowed lowest to the slave power, have received honor and emolu-
ment. Dewey and those like him, rise in fame and prosperity.4Unitarian clergyman Orville Dewey spoke at a “Great Union Meeting" in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, on 27 December 1850, where he called the Fugitive Slave Law an “absolute necessity" for the nation’s survival and declared, “I would consent that my own brother, my own son, should go [into slavery]—ten times rather would I go myself—than that this Union should be sacrificed for me or for us.” Abolitionists quickly spread the report that he actually had said “mother” instead of “brother.” Dewey denied the charge and tried to clarify his “moderate” position on fugitive slaves, but even fellow conservative Henry W. Bellows of the First Unitarian Church in New York confessed he did not “like” Dewey's “timid, calculating balancing consideration of this Fugitive Slave bill, a bit.” In early 1851 Dewey accepted a call to preach at the First Unitarian Church in Washington, D.C., the following winter. At the same time, in February 1851, he was “surprised” to receive an unsolicited commission as chaplain in the United States Navy. “I . . . concluded,” Dewey later wrote, “as there was a Navy Yard in Washington, and as the President, Mr. Fillmore, attended the church to which I was invited, that he intended by this appointment to help both the church and me, and I accepted it.” As his friend Bellows, who had urged rejection, predicted, the “whole pack" of abolitionists “howled” that Dewey was being rewarded for “services rendered the Union." When Dewey later learned that he had no official duties to perform at the Navy Yard he resigned the commission. Mary E. Dewey, ed., Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. (Boston, 1883), 108-09; FDP, 4 March 1852; Douglas C. Stange, “From Treason to Antislavery Patriotism: Unitarian Conservatives and the Fugitive Slave Law," Harvard Library Bulletin, 26: 279-81 (July 1978); Clarence Gohdes, “Some Notes on the Unitarian Church in the Ante-Bellum South: A Contribution to the History of Southern Liberalism," in American Studies in Honor of William Kenneth Boyd, ed., David Kelly Jackson (Durham, N.C., 1940), 347; Conrad Wright, The Liberal Christians: Essays on American Unitarian History (Boston, 1970), 75-78. Simmons,
who at Springfield denounced mob law, is driven from the pulpit;5George Frederick Simmons (1814-55), remembered as a “philosophical” and “lonely soul" whose “tastes led him away from antislavery agitation," twice lost his pulpit for preaching sermons sympathetic to the antislavery cause. Immediately after his ordination in 1838, the Boston-born and Harvard-educated Simmons accepted the pastorate of the Unitarian Society in Mobile, Alabama. There he was “universally admired" until May 1840, when he delivered two sermons on slavery. In the first, which was generally well-received, he urged kind and understanding treatment of slaves; in the second he dealt directly with the more controversial subject of emancipation. While still a student in the Harvard Divinity School Simmons had anonymously published a moderate defense of William Ellery Channing's Slavery (Boston, 1835) in which he endorsed gradual emancipation and optimistically announced that southern opinion on slavery was “daily changing." Acting on this assumption but disclaiming any association with abolitionism, Simmons told his Mobile congregation that if emancipation were legally impossible Christian slaveholders should adopt an alternative system of bondage in which slaves, treated more as freemen than as “things,” would receive wages for their work and be fully protected in their domestic and civil rights. “Thus will Christianity eat out the heart of Slavery even while Slavery continues," he declared. Two days later the young minister fled the city as a result of threats made against him by “respectable” citizens acting in the name of “self-preservation." Simmons returned to Massachusetts where over the next eight years—interrupted by two years of study in Germany—he supplied several small churches. In 1848 he became pastor of the Unitarian Church in Springfield, Massachusetts. When leading citizens allowed burning effigies, inflammatory handbills, and “riotous assemblages" to menace the visit of abolitionist George Thompson in February 1851, a disturbed Simmons delivered two sermons on “Public Spirit and Mobs." Acknowledging “a degree of sympathy with the Abolitionists” but considering that to be no “crime,” he reminded his parishioners that “[i]n another place it was so considered. . . . But here, I trust, it is not reckoned a crime to share the opinions of Charming, of Franklin, and of Wilberforce." Within a week of these remarks Simmons received a notice of dismissal from offended parishioners. In poor health, he eventually settled in Albany, New York, where he served a small Unitarian congregation until his death. Sprague, AAP, 8: 554-58; PaF, 9 July 1840; Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, Twentieth Annual Report (Boston, 1852), 40-42; Douglas C. Stange, Patterns of Antislavery among American Unitarians, 1831-1860 (Rutherford, N.J., 1977), 90-93; Filler, Crusade Against Slavery, 71; NASS, 15 September 1855. but
thanks God! for the future in old England the order is to be reversed, and
those who have spoken for God and humanity shall be held in the highest
estimation, and the traitor to freedom shall be utterly despised.6From New York Daily Tribune, 10 May 1851. They had
no right to hospitality in England, or elsewhere. He took the ground that a
slaveholder had no right to live, and therefore that, above all, the apologist
for Slavery had no right to live; to receive, at any rate, a welcome to any
part of the universe. He is as much an enemy to the human race, and as
much to be detested, as the tiger. He has no right to our sympathies until he
shall repent. If these apologists were ignorant, it would be a different thing,
if they were innocent of the crime. But it could not be said so. They were
endeavoring to preach themselves into high places. The clerical advocates
of the Fugitive Slave Law had this object in view—at any rate, they aimed
at popularity. They advocate that law because they know that by so doing
they may, perchance, get some of the high places.
Mr. Douglass then remarked briefly on the view of the subject taken by
Mr. Quincy, and concurred with him that this was indeed the most inconsis-
tent and most impudent nation that had ever existed.7Speaking in support of the resolutions praising George Thompson, Edmund Quincy recalled how the United States had been “built up by the interference of foreigners" and reminded his listeners that “we have heard no complaint of this interference with our affairs, until a foreigner appeared to point his finger at the plague spot of the American nation." Since the United States itself “was not very careful to avoid interference" in the concerns of other countries, he concluded that “ours was the most impudent nation on the face of the earth, as well as the most inconsistent." NASS, 15 May 1851; Lib., 23 May 1851. He remarked that it
had been asserted, as a reason for England’s non-interference, that she had
placed Slavery here. If so, then she had an increased right to endeavor to rid
us of what she has become convinced is a curse and a disgrace. Nations
could help each other. It was a happy circumstance that nations did not all
advance equally in the path of reform. In one thing, one nation made more
progress than another. We had sent our temperance agents to England to
convert the beer-loving English, and no complaint had been made. We had
advanced more than the English in the cause of temperance reform. The
English could instruct us on the subject of Slavery, for in that case they had
advanced a step further than we.
Mr. Douglass, in referring to the term impudent, which Mr. Quincy
had applied to America, made some rather amusing remarks. It was, he
said, a word with which he and his people were very familiar. If a negro
came into a white man’s presence in the South with his hat on, he was told
he was impudent. The same, if he passed on the inner side of the sidewalk.
To assert their rights was to be impudent. However, he could not say with
Mr. Quincy that we were an impudent people, because he [Quincy] was
white, whilst he [Douglass] was a black. (Laughter.)
Mr. D[ouglass] then referred to the fact that whilst the New York
Herald was condemning foreign interference in the person of George
Thompson, it was advocating the interference of America in the affairs of
St. Domingo.8The New York Herald published two editorials on these subjects during the week preceding the anniversary meeting. On 29 April, in response to reports that British “secret agents" were urging secession in South Carolina, the paper strongly denounced past and present instances of “English Intermeddling" for commercial gain. The editorial pointed to Thompson's speaking tour as an example of current interference that, threatening both the Union and northern prosperity, should “not be tolerated for a moment. “On the following day the Herald described the “tyranny" of Haiti's Emperor Faustin Soulouqué, who was then resisting the independence movement in Santo Domingo. The editorialist lamented that “though through the last year we have known enough to authorize the government to teach his black majesty that he must heed the remonstrances of an enlightened and powerful nation," the administration lately seemed determined to protect Soulouqué "from any action which our citizens may choose to take in behalf of the common and natural demands of humanity." He therefore urged the “adventurers of the day" to "emigrate" to Santo Domingo and help the inhabitants establish a prosperous independent nation. New York Herald, 29, 30 April 1851. So much for consistency. He said that he had just learned
that Bennett9James Gordon Bennett. himself constituted a case of huge interference, as he was a
Scotchman. (Laughter.)