The Free Negro’s Place is in America: An Address Delivered in Buffalo, New York, on September 18, 1851
THE FREE NEGRO’S PLACE IS IN AMERICA: AN ADDRESS
DELIVERED IN BUFFALO, NEW YORK, ON 18 SEPTEMBER 1851
Frederick Douglass' Paper, 2 October 1851. Another text in Foner, Life and Writings,
5: 201-04, misdated 17 September 1851.
Hoping to unite “land-reformers, free-traders, anti-slavery men, temperance
men, peace men, and all other political reformers,” the Liberty party held a
national nominating convention in Buffalo, New York, on 17-18 September
1851. Despite the efforts of Gerrit Smith to promote the gathering, fewer than
one hundred twenty-five delegates attended. Douglass served on the commit-
tee on nominations and was appointed to the party’s national committee. On
the second day the convention nominated Gerrit Smith for president and
Charles Durkee for vice president. At the evening meeting of 18 September
the delegates considered a resolution against emigration: “That the home of
the freed black man is most emphatically where his black brother is still held
as a slave; that there his presence is indispensable to comfort and cheer and
encourage the oppressed.” After songs and a prayer, William W. Anderson of
Jamaica spoke. He maintained that, were he a responsible black husband and
father, “I should deem it my duty not to continue a struggle. . . but should
consider it a Christian duty” to transport his family to the “preferable
asylum” of Jamaica, where blacks enjoyed the rights denied them in the
United States. Douglass, who had spoken on the Fugitive Slave Law the
previous evening, followed. After his speech, John Scoble, Henry Bibb, and
J. W. Loguen addressed the convention. Douglass then spoke again, after
which the resolution against emigration was adopted. FDP, 4, 25 September,
16, 23 October 1851. New York Daily Times, 19 September 1851; New York
Daily Tribune, 19 September 1851.
It is my purpose to occupy but a few moments of the meeting on this
subject, as I know you are anxious to hear our other friend (Mr. Scoble)1British clergyman, antislavery leader, and emigrationist John Scoble (c. 1810-?), who had attended the convention of North American blacks in Toronto on 11-13 September, was invited to the Buffalo convention by Gerrit Smith. Scoble was one of the first salaried lecturers for the Agency Committee and later served as its secretary when it became the British and Foreign Society for the Universal Abolition of Negro Slavery and the Slave Trade. He was a member of Joseph Sturge's West Indies expedition of 1836-37 and afterwards lectured on the abuses of the apprenticeship system in British Guiana. Originally an ally of Garrison, Scoble broke with him in 1840 over the woman question. In 1842 he became secretary of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society and helped edit its Anti-Slavery Reporter. Scoble traveled throughout the West Indies, Canada, and the United States soliciting antislavery support and investigating the conditions of free and slave labor. While in France in 1844, he and George Alexander coauthored the influential pamphlet Liberté immediate et absolue au esclavage for the notably aristocratic Société pour l‘Abolition de I'Esclavage. Known for his antagonistic public manner, Scoble eventually proved a divisive influence on the British and Foreign AntiSlavery Society, and his retirement in 1852 came amid hushed requests for his resignation. Resuming his antislavery activities in Canada West as manager of the failing British-American Dawn Institute for refugee slaves. Scoble faced widespread opposition. The Liberator claimed that Scoble's “malignity of spirit is equaled only by its meanness and unscrupulousness, destitute of every manly trait, and activated by motives baser personal and intensely selfish." During his fifteen years of service to Dawn, Scoble only intensified the settlement's financial problems and political controversies. He was subjected to four official investigations on charges of mismanagement, and was finally sued by Josiah Henson, one of the founders of Dawn, for “non-fulfillment of trusts and for maladministration." Henson lost the case and angrily deleted every reference to Scoble from his autobiography. After a number of unsuccessful attempts to win Canadian legislative office, and with prospects of Dawn's prosperity still waning, Scoble returned to England in 1867. London British Banner, 7 January 1852; Lib., 2 July 1852; John Scoble, British Guiana: Speech Delivered at the Anti-Slavery Meeting, in Exeter Hall, on Wednesday, the 4th April 1838 (London, 1838); Merrill and Ruchames, Garrison Letters, 2: 527-28, 4: 311; Dwight L. Dumond, ed., Letters of James Gillespie Birney, 1831-1857, 2 vols. (New York, 1938), 2: 583; Temperly, British Anti-Slavery, 12-13, 37-38, 78-79, 187, 242; Pease and Pease, Black Utopia, 63-83; Winks, Blacks in Canada, 201-04; Abel and Klingberg, Side-Light on Anglo-American Relations, 101, 275n; Alexander Lovell Murray, “Canada and the Anglo-American Anti-Slavery Movement: A Study in International Philanthropy" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Pennsylvania, 1960), 482.
from England.
In listening to the remarks of our friend from Jamaica,2Douglass refers to the preceding speaker, William Wemyss Anderson, a Scottish-born Jamaican solicitor and politician who became a spokesman for Jamaican colonization. In 1851 the Jamaican House of Assembly sent Anderson to the United States and Canada to ascertain the feasibility of convincing free blacks to emigrate to Jamaica as laborers, farmers, and tradesmen. A week before his encounter with Douglass, Anderson attended the Toronto convention, where he proposed the establishment in British Guiana of a separate nation for blacks from Canada, the United States, and the British West Indies. Later, Anderson claimed that Jamaica, unlike Canada, was an “amicable” interracial society, “essentially a colored country" with remarkably fertile soil and a pleasant climate. Allied in his early career with the Kingston Progressives, Anderson had also been one of five assemblymen in 1836 to oppose British support of the Jamaican legislation that favored former slaveowners. He became clerk of the peace and assemblyman from Portland, and practiced law in Kingston. In 1865 Anderson made an unsuccessful attempt to aid in the defense of his longtime friend and client George William Gordon, who was sentenced to death under martial law on charges of instigating the Morant Bay riots. FDP, 25 September, 2 October 1851; New York Daily Tribune, 24 September 1851; Windsor (Canada West) Voice of the Fugitive, 24 September 1851; African Repository, 27: 325-26 (November 1851); Ansell Hart, The Life of George William Gordon (Kingston, Jamaica, 1973), 64, 100; Lord Sydney Haldane Olivier, The Myth of Governor Eyre (London, 1933), 309; Miller, Search For a Black Nationality, 111-12; [M. T. Newsom, comp.], Arguments, Pro and Con, on the Call for a National Emigration Convention, to be held at Cleveland, Ohio, August, 1854, by Frederick Douglass, W. J. Watkins, and James M. Whitfield; With a Short Appendix of the Statistics of Canada West, West Indies, Central and South America (Detroit, 1854). I was struck
with the similarity of the reasons given by him for the emigration of colored
persons from this country, to those which are given, but with very different
motives, by the agents of the American Colonization Society—a society
which ever has and, I hope, ever will receive the utter detestation of every
colored man in the land. I know that our friend (Mr. A[nderson]) will find it
difficult to appreciate the reasons which induce the free colored people of
these states to insist upon remaining here. He sees us, a suffering people,
hemmed in on every side by the malignant and bitter prejudice which
excludes us from nearly every profitable employment in this country, and
which, as he has well said, has led several of the states to legislate for our
expulsion.
In the extremity of our need, he comes to us in the spirit of benevo-
lence, I believe, and holds out to us the prospect of a better country, the
prospect of a home, where none shall molest or make us afraid. And he will
think it strange that we do not accept of his benevolent proffer, and wel-
come him in his mission of mercy and good will towards us. And yet we
must say that such a welcome cannot be given by the colored people of this
country without stabbing their own cause to the vitals, without conceding a
point which every black man should feel that he must die for rather than
yield, and that is, that the prejudice and the mal-administration toward us in
this country are invincible to truth, invincible to combined and virtuous
effort for their overthrow. We must make no such concession.
Sir, the slaveholders have long been anxious to get rid of the free
colored person of this country. They know that where we are left free,
blacks though we are, thick-skulled as they call us, we shall become
intelligent, and, moreover, that as we become intelligent, in just that pro-
portion shall we become an annoyance to them in their slaveholding. They
are anxious therefore to get us out of the country. They know that a hundred
thousand intelligent, upright, industrious and persevering black men in the
northern states must command respect and sympathy, must encircle them-
selves with the regard of a large class of the virtue-loving, industry-loving
people of the north, and that whatever sympathy, whatever respect they are
able to command must have a reflex influence upon slavery. And, there-
fore, they say “out with them,” let us get rid of them!
For my part, I am not disposed to leave, and, I think, our friend must
have been struck with the singular kind of applause at certain sayings of his,
during the address—an applause that seemed to come from the galleries,
from the door, and from that part of the house that does not wish to be
mixed up with the platform. Straws show which way the wind blows
(applause). I fancied, too, that when our friend was portraying the bless-
ings that would result from our removal from this land to Jamaica, that
delightful visions were floating before the minds of those gentlemen in the
distance. (Great applause.)
Now sir, I want to say on behalf of any negroes I have the honor to
represent, that we have been with, still are with you, and mean to be with
you to the end. (Cheers) It may seem ungrateful, but there are some of us
who are resolved that you shall not get rid of your colored relations.
(Immense applause.) Why should we not stay with you? Have we not a
right here? I know the cry is raised that we are out of our native land, that
this land is the land of the white man; that Africa is the home of the negro,
and not America.
But how stands the matter? I believe that simultaneously with the
landing of the pilgrims, there landed slaves on the shores of this continent,
and that for two hundred and thirty years and more we have had a foothold
on this continent. We have grown up with you, we have watered your soil
with our tears, nourished it with our blood, tilled it with our hard hands.
Why should we not stay here? We came when it was a wilderness, and were
the pioneers of civilization on this continent. We levelled your forests, our
hands removed the stumps from your fields, and raised the first crops and
brought the first produce to your tables. We have been with you, are still
with you, have been with you in adversity, and by the help of God will be
with you in prosperity. (Repeated applause.)
There was a time when certain learned men of this country undertook to
argue us out of existence. Professor Grant of New York reckoned us of a
race belonging to a by-gone age, which, in the progress of the human
family, would become perfectly extinct. Yet we do not die. It does seem
that there is a Providence in this matter. Chain us, lash us, hunt us with
bloodhounds, surround us with utter insecurity, render our lives never so
hard to be borne, and yet we do live on—smile under it all and are able to
smile. Amid all our afflictions there is an invincible determination to stay
right here, because a large portion of the American people desire to get rid
of us. In proportion to the strength of their desire to have us go, in just that
proportion is the strength of our determination to stay, and in staying we
ask nothing but justice. We have fought for this country, and we only ask to
be treated as well as those who fought against it. We are American citizens,
and we only ask to be treated as well as you treat aliens. And you will treat
us so yet.
Most men assume that we cannot make progress here. It is not true sir.
That we can make progress in the future is proved by the progress we have
already made. Our condition is rapidly improving. Sir, but a few years ago,
if I attempted to ride on the railroad cars in New England, and presumed to
take my seat in the cars with white persons, I was dragged out like a beast. I
have often been beaten until my hands were blue with the blows in order to
make me disengage those hands from the bench on which I was seated. On
every railroad in New England this was the case. How is it now? Why, a
negro may ride just where he pleases, and there is not the slightest objection
raised, and I have very frequently rode over those same roads since, and
never received the slightest indignity on account of my complexion.
Indeed the white people are becoming more and more disposed to
associate with the blacks. I am constantly annoyed by these pressing atten-
tions. (Great laughter.) I used to enjoy the privilege of an entire seat, and
riding a great deal at night, it was quite an advantage to me, but sometime
ago, riding up from Geneva, I had curled myself up, and by the time I had
got into a good snooze, along came a man and lifted up my blanket. I
looked up and said, “pray do not disturb me, I am a black man.” (Laugh-
ter.) “I don’t care who the devil you are, only give me a seat,” was the
reply. (Roars of laughter.) I tell you the white people about here are
beginning “to don’t care who the devil you are.” If you can put a dollar in
their way, or a seat under them, they don’t care who the devil you are. But I
will not detain you longer, I know you are anxious to hear our friend from
England.