Agitate, Agitate: A Speech Delivered in Salem, Ohio on August 23, 1852
AGITATE, AGITATE: AN ADDRESS DELIVERED IN SALEM, OHIO, ON 23 AUGUST 1852
Anti-Slavery Bugle. 1 January 1853. Another text in Foner, Life and Writings, 5 : 243-45.
Douglass was greatly pleased by the invitation that he received from the still orthodoxly Garrisonian Western Anti-Slavery Society to attend its tenth
anniversary convention. However, he did not arrive in Salem, Ohio, until the afternoon of the first day of the convention, after what he described as "a long and tedious journey." The convention lasted three days and was held in the Hicksite Quaker Meeting House. Deliberater seeking to avoid controversy, Douglass nevertheless made a number of speeches or remarks explaining his views on the Constitution. The speech printed below was given on the third and final day of the convention and seems clearly an attempt by Douglass to show his goodwill toward the Society. Perhaps it was this conciliatory pose which caused Parker Pillsbury to question Douglass's political allegiances. “What seemed to me most remarkable in our friend DOUGLASS,” wrote Pillsbury to William Lloyd Ganison, “was a certain vagueness as to what his present position is. . . . We could not really tell, at times, whether DOUGLASS was one thing or the other.” In another letter in the National Anti-Slavery Standard, Pillsbury remarked that Douglass, when he “soared above the mists and musks of politics, . . . was eloquent in the most superlative degree “and “reminded” him “moumfully of what he once was.” Douglass had no such reservations about the convention. “We were gratified," he wrote in Frederick Douglass' Paper, “and we shall remember with pleasure, this instance of meeting with western abolitionists. The difference of opinion known to exist betwixt us, doubtless induced some to look upon us as an interloper. . . but the mass received us kindly and heard us gladly. ” Douglass to Gerrit Smith, 19 August 1852, Gerrit Smith Papers, NSyU; Parker Pillsbury to [Sidney Howard] Gay, 24 August 1852, in NASS, 9 September 1852; idem to Garrison, 30 August 1852, in Lib., 10 September 1852; PaF, 4 September 1852; NASS, 19 August, 23 September 1852; A58, 28 August, 4, ll, 18 September, 2 October 1852; FDP, 3 September 1852; Lib., 10, 17 September 1852.
I want my good will for the W[estem] A[nti-] S[lavery] Society1In 1842, Abram Brooke (1806—67) of Clinton County, Ohio, and Hicksite Quaker leader
Joseph Dugdale (1810-96) of Columbiana County, Ohio, led a secession from the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society to form the pro-Garrisonian Ohio American Anti-Slavery Society. The president of the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society, Gamaliel Bailey (1807—59). had since 1840 attempted to accommodate both “old organization" and “new organization" sympathizers in an “independent” state antislavery society. But Brooke, Dugdale. and their supporters withdrew when the society's 1842 anniversary meeting refused to reaffiliate with Garrison‘s American Anti-Slavery Society. The seceders, many of whom had been among the original members ofthe Ohio Anti-Slavery Society, affimied the primacy of moral suasion as an instrument of social change. They objected to the increasing emphasis on politics by the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society. Based in Salem, the Ohio American Anti-Slavery Society, which after 1846 operated as the Western Anti-Slavery Society, drew its principal membership from the communities of Hicksite Quakers and New England and eastern Pennsylvania migrants settled in northeastern Ohio. In the early 1850s the Western Anti-Slavery Society organized affiliates in south eastern Michigan and remained a stronghold of disunionist sentiment until its last meeting in April 1861. In contrast to the older Ohio Anti-Slavery Society, the new regional society, under the leadership of Brooke, Oliver Johnson (1807-59), and Marius R. Robinson (1806-70), included women on its executive committee. Notable among its women officers were Jane Elizabeth Hitchcock Jones (1813-96), who served as one of the original coeditors of the society's journal, the Anti-Slavery Bugle, and feminist leader Josephine Sophia White Griffing (1814-72) of Medina. Ohio, who regularly served as a lecturing agent. Douglas A. Gamble, “Garrisonian Abolitionism in the West: Some Suggestions for Study," Civil War History, 23 : 52-68 (March 1977); C. B. Galbreath, “Anti-Slavery Movement in Columbiana County,“ Ohio State Archeological and Historical Quarterly, 30 : 392 (October 1921); Russel B. Nye, “Marius Robinson, A Forgotten Abolitionist Leader," ibid., 55 : 138-54 (April-June 1946); NASS, 30 March 1867; Edward T. James et 31.. eds., Notable American Women, 1607-1950: A Biographical Dictionary, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass, 1971), 2 : 92-94, 285-86; DAB, 1 : 496-97. understood, and I desire to show it especially in this matter of sustaining its
operations. I know, notwithstanding I am a politician and have become a Liberty party man, that the pioneers of this A[nti-l S[lavery] movement, the men upon whom this cause rests most fully, those who will have to bear the burden and heat of the day, are those who are connected with this Society. I know that political action is necessary only in the rear of public sentiment, and whenever public sentiment is strongly anti-slavery enough, then will be generated a party who will “crystalize” as Wendell Phillips said, “this sentiment into law.” I think I understand the philosophy of Reform well enough to know that the man or society which utters the truth most pointedly, and applies it most closely and stringently to the public mind, no matter if a small minority, that man or body is doing most to promote the A[nti-] S[laveryJ cause. They may not be doing all the work. They who scorn all abuse on account of principle, and believe only in flinging that principle before the public mind, are the men who are bringing about the abolition of the wrong against which they are so contending, and their hands ought to be held up. Now I can vote one day in the year against slavery, and think it my duty to do so, but every other day I want the burning coals of truth to be thrown upon the nation’s naked breast, and because you are working thus it is our duty as Free Soilers to aid you in your work.
Besides, we know that political parties are a very uncertain sort of machinery; we do not know to what base uses these organizations may be put, and we want a force outside of them, something to fall back upon in the day of trial when these parties fail us. We need a body who will be faithful and who will apply the principles of truth continually. I have engaged for life in this work, but I am going to be a man. A free man. Free to adopt any views, any instrumentalities, which I think will advance the good cause, and although I vote, I believe that the great instrumentality after all, is the
“foolishness of preaching.” The work is to be done by exposing the damning deeds of Slavery, the abominations of the church, in short by agitation. Agitate, agitate. This is the grand instrumentality, and without this you Free Soilers will come to nothing. I go as a Liberty party man for sustaining all the moral movements of the country. I have no idea that you abolitionists of the W[estem] A[nti-] S[lavery] Society will ever be able to bring all the people up to your platform; and it is not necessary, for long before you have converted the whole people to your doctrine of “No union with Slaveholders,”2The motto appeared on the masthead of the Anti-Slavery Bugle. slavery will be blotted out. Go on then with your preaching, you can all do something, both men and women.
It is the poor man work. The rich and noble will not do it. I know what it is to get a living by rolling casks on the wharves, and sweeping chimneys, and such like, and this makes me able to sympathise with the poor, and the bound everywhere. It is not to the rich that we are to look but to the poor, to the hardhanded working men of the country; these are the men who are to come to the rescue of the slave. I tell you my friends and fellow citizens, there is room enough for us all, there is a niche in the temple of Reform for every body. Abolitionism has made me a great man, (beg pardon for the egotism), but it delivered me from the bondage of sectarianism and priestcraft, from the bondage of my color even, and false notions of human brotherhood, and has opened the wide world of humanity, and taught me that though my heart is small, yet there every man under the wide canopy of heaven can find room. Why what has it not done for me, for us all? It has taught us that we have a heart and conscience, that we are a part of the great whole of humanity. Let us up then and be doing, and learn to labor and to wait.3Douglass adapts lines from the final stanza of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “A Psalm of Life." Poems. 22. What matters it if you are few in numbers, let me tell you friends, that even if a man be alone and be right, he is a majority in the universe. If he does not represent the present state of things, he represents the future. If not what men are, what they ought to be. Be true then to your convictions, and I will try and be true to mine; and so far as we can, let us unite for the common cause. I did not come here to subserve the interests or ends of any party, but to subserve the interests of the cause, and I shall go back cheered and strengthened by what I have seen and heard. Let us devote ourselves heart and hand to the work, and go on rejoicing in the proclamation of truth.