Frederick Douglass William Lloyd Garrison, November 8, 1842
FREDERICK DOUGLASS TO WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON1William Lloyd Garrison (1805–79) was so closely identified with the abolitionist movement in the United States that his name became almost synonymous with the cause. He began his career as an apprentice printer on the Newburyport (Mass.) Herald at the age of thirteen. Garrison became editor of the Newburyport Free Press in 1826, but the paper closed within a year. He was then associated with a series of reform-oriented periodicals in Boston before Benjamin Lundy introduced him to the antislavery cause. Garrison and Lundy edited the Genius of Universal Emancipation in Baltimore, Maryland, from 1829 to 1830, when a libel suit against them forced the paper to close and landed Garrison in jail. After his release, he courted the wealthy merchants of New York and Boston in order to start the Liberator (1831–65), a weekly journal based in Boston in which he advocated an immediate end to slavery. Garrison’s brand of abolition condemned any institution that would tolerate the existence of slavery, including churches, political parties, and even the United States itself, and any scheme aimed at removing black people from the United States. Instead, Garrison hoped to raise the public's awareness that slavery was morally wrong, thereby forcing its end in an almost millennial moment of emancipation. His approach appealed to both white and black antislavery advocates, but earned him many enemies among slaveholders and those only moderately opposed to slavery. Seeing the need for greater action and organization beyond the pages of the Liberator, Garrison joined with other abolitionists to form the New England Anti-Slavery Society in 1831. Two years later he also helped to form the larger American Anti-Slavery Society. In 1833 he established ties with English abolitionists after a trip to Great Britain, and he later brought the noted and notorious speaker George Thompson so United States for a tour. Ever the radical, Garrison expanded his interests to include women’s rights after female delegates were excluded from the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840. The issue of women’s participation in the antislavery movement and Garrison’s absolute refusal to turn to politics to end slavery caused a division in the American Anti-Slavery Society. Those who opposed women's acting as speakers and who hoped to use politics toward abolition formed the “New Organization.” Garrison’s ideas were so closely associated with the “Old Organization” that they became known more frequently as the “Garrisonians.” With the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, Garrison believed that he had accomplished his life’s work and that of the antislavery movement. He then resigned from the presidency of the American Anti-Slavery Society and closed the Liberator. Wendell Phillips Garrison and Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805–1879: The Story of His Life Told By His Children, 4 vols. (New York, 1885–89); Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York, 1998); James Brewer Stewart, William Lloyd Garrison and the Challenge of Emancipation (Arlington Heights, Ill., 1992); John L. Thomas, The Liberator: William Lloyd Garrison (Boston, 1963); Dictionary of American Biography, 20 vols. (New York, 1928–36), 7:168–72.
Lynn, [Mass.] 8 November 1842.
DEAR FRIEND GARRISON:2The letter was published in the Liberator under the headline “Frederick Douglass in behalf of Geo. Latimer.” By using Douglass’s name, the headline treats Douglass as a personage even though this was his first publication.
The date of this letter finds me quite unwell. I have for a week past been laboring, in company with bro. Charles Remond,3Charles Lenox Remond (1810–73), the first black lecturer hired by any antislavery society, was born in Salem, Massachusetts, to the daughter of a black hero of the American Revolution and a former slave from Curaçao. In his youth, he learned about the horrors of slavery from his father and experienced the segregation and discrimination practiced by northern white people. In the late 1820s and early 1830s, Remond read David Walker’s Appeal and became acquainted with William Lloyd Garrison, events that led him to dedicate his life to abolitionism. He became an agent for the >Liberator and joined the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society shortly thereafter. In 1838 he began lecturing for the American Anti-Slavery Society. Both his color and his ability made him a very popular speaker in both the United States and Great Britain, where he attended the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention as a delegate in 1840. Remond was the sole black lecturer among antislavery societies until Frederick Douglass in 1842. For a time, Remond and Douglass worked the lecture circuit together, and Douglass admired Remond, the more experienced speaker, and named a son for him. Through the 1840s, however, Remond remained a steadfast Garrisonian while Douglass moved toward political action to end slavery, and their friendship suffered. Their goals remained the same, and, like Douglass, Remond recruited black soldiers for the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth Infantry Regiment during the Civil War. After the war, just before his death, Remond urged abolitionists to continue their fight by combating the racial prejudice that persisted in both the North and the South after the end of slavery. William E. Ward, “Charles Lenox Remond: Black Abolitionist, 1838–1873” (Ph.D. diss., Clark University, 1977); Les Wallace, “Charles Lenox Remond: The Lost Prince of Abolitionism,” NHB, 40:696–701 (May–June 1977); National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 63 vols. (New York, 1893–1984), 2:303; DAB, 15:499–500. in New-Bedford,4On 4 November 1842, Douglass and Remond spoke about the George Latimer case at an anti-slavery meeting in New Bedford, Massachusetts. They had also spoken about the case at a meeting in Boston’s Faneuil Hall on 30 October 1842, and Remond spoke at a Nantucket meeting on 6 November 1842. Lib., 28 October, 8, 11, 18 November 1842; Ward, “Charles Lenox Remond,” 119–25. with special reference to the case of our outraged brother, George Latimer,5George Latimer (1820–?) was a fugitive from Norfolk, Virginia. In October 1842, his former master, James Gray, a Maryland merchant, apprehended him in Boston and brought him before Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story. Story placed Latimer in the custody of Gray, but forbade the removal of Latimer from Massachusetts until Gray’s title to Latimer arrived from Virginia. While Gray waited for that evidence, he had Latimer held in the Suffolk County jail on Leverett Street in Boston. Subsequent motions under Massachusetts law to have Latimer released on bond were denied by Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Shaw held that federal law prevailed over any state statute to the contrary, and that Latimer had been properly held in the jail under federal law pursuant to Story’s ruling. Boston abolitionists rallied behind Latimer, forming committees, publishing a newspaper, and holding various meetings that incited public opinion against both Gray and Story. In November 1842, when both legal and extralegal efforts to free Latimer failed, the abolitionists raised $400 and purchased Latimer’s freedom. Still enraged that the Massachusetts legal system had been used to support slavery, Latimer’s supporters then collected over 65,000 signatures on a petition to the Massachusetts legislature. As a result, the legislature passed the Personal Liberty Act of 1843, barring the use of state authorities or facilities in the capture and return of fugitive slaves. This law set a precedent for other northern states, many of which passed similar acts in the ensuing twenty years. “The Latimer Case,” Law Reporter, 5:481–98 (March 1843); “Note to the Latimer Case,” ibid., 524; James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, Black Bostonians: Family Life and Community Struggle in the Antebellum North (1979; New York, 1999), 108:, C. Peter Ripley, ed., The Black Abolitionist Papers, 5 vols. (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1985–92), 3:445n. and speaking almost day and night, in public and in private; and for the reward of our labor, I have the best evidence that a great good has been done. It is said by many residents, that New-Bedford has never been so favorably aroused to her anti-slavery responsibility as at present. Our meetings were characterized by that deep and solemn feeling which the importance of the cause, when properly set forth, is always calculated to awaken. On Sunday, we held three meetings in the new town hall, at the usual meeting hours, morning, afternoon, and evening. In the morning, we had quite a large meeting, at the opening of which, I occupied about an hour, on the question as to whether a man is better than a sheep. Mr. Dean,6William Dean of Salem, Massachusetts, and his wife, Lydia, were both active abolitionists. He also served on the executive committee of the Essex County Temperance Society and on the board of managers for the Salem Dispensary. James R. Newhall, The Essex Memorial, for 1836, Embracing a Register of the County (Salem, Mass., 1836), 38, 254; Walter Merrill and Louis Ruchames, eds., The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, 6 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1971–81), 2:454n. then made a few remarks, and after him, Mr. Clapp, of Nantucket,7In the 1840s, Henry Clapp (1814–75) of Nantucket edited the Lynn (Mass.) Pioneer before its sale to the Herald of Freedom. Clapp publicly criticized the Garrisonians, but his letters continued to appear in the Liberator. After traveling in Europe, Clapp moved to New York City, where he became known as the “King of Bohemia” among the artists and writers who frequented Pfaff ’s Beerhouse on Bleeker Street. He also edited the Saturday Press (1858–66), a literary magazine that published the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain, and Clapp’s friend Walt Whitman. Lib., 6 December 1844; Joel Myerson, ed., Whitman in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Memoirs, and Interviews by Friends and Associates (Iowa City, Iowa, 2000), 126; Garrison and Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 3:157; Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, 3:465n; NCAB, 9:121. arose and gave his testimony to the truth, as it is in anti-slavery. The meeting then adjourned, to meet again in the afternoon. I said that we held our meetings at the regular meeting hours. Truth requires me to make our afternoon meeting an exception to this remark. For long before the drawling, lazy church bells commenced sounding their deathly notes, mighty crowds were making their way to the town hall. They needed no bells to remind them of their duty to bleeding humanity. They were not going to meeting to hear as to the best mode of performing water baptism;8The rite of baptism is depicted in John 1:31–33, Luke 3:16, Matt. 3:11. they were not going to meeting to have their prayers handsomely said for them, or to say them, merely, themselves; but to pray, not in word, but in deed and in truth;9A variation of 1 John 3:18. they were not going thither to be worshipped, but to worship, in spirit and in truth;10John 4:24. they were not going to sacrifice, but to have mercy,11A reference to Matt. 9:13 and Matt. 12:7. they did not go there to find God; they had found him already.12Possibly a variation of Matt. 7:8. Such I think I may safely say of a large portion of the vast assembly that met in the afternoon. As I gazed upon them, my soul leaped for joy; and, but for the thought that the time might be better employed, I could have shouted aloud. After a short space, allotted to secret or public prayer, bro. J. B. Sanderson,13Born into the free black community in New Bedford, Massachusetts, Jeremiah Burke Sanderson (1821–75) became a leader in the antislavery movement during the 1840s. From his barbershop, a popular meeting place for African American men, he sold issues of the Liberator. He also joined the New Bedford Anti-Slavery Society, later becoming its secretary. After a successful lecture tour of the Northeast, he addressed the 1845 meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society. In 1853 he was appointed to the National Council of the Colored People and attended several black state conventions after moving to California in 1854. He remained active in politics, promoting the causes of black people against Jim Crow laws and of black education in California for the rest of his life. Kathryn Grover, The Fugitive’s Gibraltar: Escaping Slaves and Abolitionism in New Bedford, Massachusetts (Amherst, Mass., 2001), 170, 172–75, 180, 231, 276, 314; Jack Salzman, ed., Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History, 5 vols. (New York, 1996), 5:2385; Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, 3:387–88n. arose and requested the attention of the audience to the reading of a few passages of scripture, selected by yourself in the editorial of last week.14In the 4 November 1842 issue of the Liberator, Garrison published an editorial, “Legal In-justice,” in which he quoted extensively from various passages in the Bible. Lib., 4 November 1842. They did give their attention, and as he read the solemn and soul-stirring denunciations of
Jehovah, by the mouth of his prophets and apostles, against oppressors, the deep stillness that pervaded that magnificent hall was a brilliant demonstration, that the audience felt that what was read was but the reiteration of words which had fallen from the great Judge of the universe. After reading, he proceeded to make some remarks on the general question of human rights. These, too, seemed to sink deep into the hearts of the gathered multitude. Not a word was lost; it was good seed, sown in good ground, by a careful hand; it must, it will bring forth fruit.15Jesus tells the parable of the sower in Luke 8:5–15.
After him, rose bro. Remond, who addressed the meeting in his usual happy and deeply affecting style. When he had concluded his remarks, the meeting adjourned to meet again at an early hour in the evening. During the interval, our old friends and the slaves’ friends, John Butler, Thomas Jones, Noah White,16John Butler, Thomas Jones (1806–?), and Noah White were residents of New Bedford. John Butler was either a neighbor of Douglass’s and employed as a free black laborer or a free black sailor. Thomas Jones, a fugitive slave from Wilmington, North Carolina, was a stevedore and the author of The Experience of Thomas H. Jones, Who Was a Slave for Forty-Three Years (1854). Noah White worked in the home of Thomas Mandell, a local merchant. Henry H. Crapo, ed., The New Bedford Directory [for 1841] (New Bedford, 1841), 53, 86, 129; idem, The New Bedford Directory [for 1845] (New Bedford, 1845), 75, 111, 163; 1840 U.S. Census, Massachusetts, Bristol County, New Bedford, 411; Grover, Fugitive’s Gibraltar, 6, 77, 79, 213, 214. and others, were engaged in carrying benches from liberty hall to the town hall, that all who came might be accommodated with seats. They were determined to do something for humanity, though by so doing, they should be ranked with sabbath-breakers. Christianity prays for more of just such sabbath-breakers as these, and may God grant by an overwhelming revival of anti-slavery truth, to convert and send forth more just such.
The meeting met according to adjournment, at an early hour. The splendid hall was brilliantly lighted, and crowded with an earnest, listening audience, and notwithstanding the efforts of our friends before named to have them seated, a large number had to stand during the meeting, which lasted about three hours; where the standing part of the audience were, at the commencement of the meeting, there they were at the conclusion of it; no moving about with them; any place was good enough, so they could but hear. From the eminence which I occupied, I could see the entire audience; and from its appearance, I should conclude that prejudice against color was not there, at any rate, it was not to be seen by me; we were all on a level, every one took a seat just where they chose; there were neither men’s side, nor women’s side; white pew, nor black pew;17Throughout much of the antebellum North, many denominations practiced segregation in their churches. Only whites could lease or purchase pews and sit in the front of the church, while African American parishioners were consigned to separate pews in the back of the church or in a balcony. In this way, whites could ensure that blacks, even those wealthy enough to pay for the privilege of a prominent pew, remained inferior to whites in social status. Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790–1860 (Chicago, 1961), 196–97. but all seats were free, and all sides free. When the meeting was fully gathered, I had something to say, and was followed by bro. Sanderson and Remond. When they had concluded their remarks, I again took the stand, and called the attention of the meeting to the case of bro. George Latimer, which proved the finishing stroke of my present public speaking. On taking my seat, I was seized with a violent pain in my breast, which continued till morning, and with occasional raising of blood; this past off in about two hours, after which, weakness of breast, a cough, and shortness of breath ensued, so that now such
is the state of my lungs, that I am unfit for public speaking, for the present. My condition goes harder with me, much harder than it would at ordinary times. These are certainly extraordinary times; times that demand the efforts of the humblest of our most humble advocates of our perishing and dying fellow-countrymen. Those that can but whisper freedom, should be doing even that, though they can only be heard from one side of their short fire place to the other. It is a struggle of life and death with us just now. No sword that can be used, be it never so rusty, should lay idle in it[s] scabbard. Slavery, our enemy, has landed in our very midst, and commenced its bloody work. Just look at it; here is George Latimer a man—a brother—a husband—a father, stamped with the likeness of the eternal God, and redeemed by the blood of Jesus Christ, out-lawed, hunted down like a wild beast, and ferociously dragged through the streets of Boston, and incarcerated within the walls of Leverett-st. jail. And all this is done in Boston— liberty-loving, slavery-hating Boston—intellectual, moral, and religious Boston. And why was this—what crime had George Latimer committed? He had committed the crime of availing himself of his natural rights, in defence of which the founders of this very Boston enveloped her in midnight darkness, with the smoke proceeding from their thundering artillery. What a horrible state of things is here presented. Boston has become the hunting-ground of merciless men-hunters, and man-stealers. Henceforth we need not portray to the imagination of northern people, the flying slave making his way through thick and dark woods of the South, with white fanged blood-hounds yelping on his blood-stained track; but refer to the streets of Boston, made dark and dense by crowds of professed christians. Take a look at James B. Gray’s new pack, turned loose on the track of poor Latimer. I see the blood-thirsty animals, smelling at every corner, part with each other, and meet again; they seem to be consulting as to the best mode of coming upon their victim. Now they look sad, discouraged;—tired, they drag along, as if they were ashamed of their business, and about to give up the chase; but presently they get a sight of their prey, their eyes brighten, they become more courageous, they approach their victim unlike the common hound. They come upon him softly, wagging their tails, pretending friendship, and do not pounce upon him, until they have secured him beyond possible escape. Such is the character of James B. Gray’s new pack of two-legged blood-hounds that hunted down George Latimer, and dragged him away to the Leverett-street slave prison but a few days since. We need not point to the sugar fields of Louisiana, or to the rice swamps of Alabama, for the bloody deeds of this soul-crushing system, but to the
city of the pilgrims. In future, we need not uncap the bloody cells of the horrible slave prisons of Norfolk, Richmond, Mobile, and New-Orleans, and depict the wretched and forlorn condition of their miserable inmates, whose groans rend the air, pierce heaven, and disturb the Almighty; listen no longer at the snappings of the bloody slave-drivers' lash. Withdraw your attention, for a moment, from the agonizing cries coming from hearts bursting with the keenest anguish at the South, gaze no longer upon the base, cold-blooded, heartless slave-dealer of the South, who lays his iron clutch upon the hearts of husband and wife, and, with one mighty effort, tears the bleeding ligaments apart which before constituted the twain one flesh. I say, turn your attention from all this cruelty abroad, look now at home—follow me to your courts of justice—mark him who sits upon the bench. He may, or he may not—God grant he may not—tear George Latitner from a beloved wife and tender infant. But let us take a walk to the prison in which George Latimer is confined, inquire for the the turn-key; let him open the large iron-barred door that leads you to the inner prison. You need go no further. Hark! listen! hear the groans and cries of George Latimer, mingling with which may be heard the cry—my wife, my child—and all is still again.
A moment of reflection ensues—I am to be taken back to Norfolk— must be torn from a wife and tender babe, with the threat from Mr. Gray that I am to be murdered, though not in the ordinary way—not to have my head severed from my shoulders, not to he hanged—not to have my heart pierced through with a dagger—not to have my brains blown out. No, no, all these are too good for me. No; I am to be killed by inches. I know not how; perhaps by cat-hauling,18“Cat-hauling” was a form of punishment in which overseers fastened slaves face down and pulled a tomcat, claws extended, by the tail backward along the slave’s back, ripping the flesh the entire way. until my back is torn to pieces, my flesh is to be cut with the rugged lash, and I faint; warm brine must now be poured into my bleeding wounds, and through this process I must pass, until death shall end my sufferings. Good God! save me from a fate so horrible. Hark! hear him roll in his chains; 'I can die, I had rather, than go back. O, my wife! O, my child!' You have heard enough. What man, what Christian can look upon this bloody state of things without his soul swelling big with indignation on the guilty perpetrators of it, and without resolving to cast in his influence with those who are collecting the elements which are to come down its ten-fold thunder, and dash this state of things into atoms?
Men, husbands and fathers of Massachusetts—put yourselves in the place of George Latimer; feel his pain and anxiety of mind; give vent to the groans that[ ] are breaking through his fever-parched lips, from a heart [im]mersed in the deepest agony and suffering; rattle his chains; let his prospects be yours, for the space of a few moments. Remember George
Latimer in bonds as bound with him;19Heb. 13:3. keep in view the golden rule—‘All things whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so to them.[’]20A paraphrase of Matt. 7:12. ‘In as much as ye did it unto the least of these my brethren ye have done it unto me.'21Matt. 25:40.
Now make up your minds to what your duty is to George Latimer, and when you have made your minds up, prepare to do it and take the consequences, and I have no fears of George Latimer going back. I can sympathize with George Latimer, having myself been cast into a miserable jail, on suspicion of my intending to do what he is said to have done, viz. appropriating my own body to my use.
My heart is full, and had I my voice, I should be doing all that I am capable of, for Latimer’s redemption. I can do but little in any department; but if one department is more the place for me than another, that one is before the people.
I can’t write to much advantage, having never had a day’s schooling my life,22Although Maryland law did not explicitly ban blacks, either free or enslaved, from reading, most white southerners believed that literacy led to slave insurrections and undermined the social foundation of slavery, and local custom strictly prohibited slaves from reading. Slaves did, however, learn to read through methods other than formal schooling. Douglass received his first lessons from his mistress, Sophia Auld, and from the boys whom he met on the Baltimore streets. He honed his skills on the Columbian Orator, a compilation of speeches edited by Caleb Bingham, and at the East Baltimore Mental Improvement Society run by free blacks. Janet Duitsman Cornelius, “When I Can Read My Title Clear”: Literacy, Slavery, and Religion in the Antebellum South (Columbia, S.C., 1991), 33–34. nor have I ever ventured to give publicity to any of my scribbling before; nor would I now, but for my peculiar circumstances.
Your grateful friend,
FREDERICK DOUGLASS
PLSr: Lib, 18 November 1842. Reprinted in NASS, 8 December 1842; JNH, 10:648–53 (October 1925); Woodson, Mind of the Negro, 384–89. PLeSr: Foner, Life and Writings, 1:105–09.