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Wendell Phillips to Frederick Douglass, April 22, 1845

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WENDELL PHILLIPS TO FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Boston, [Mass] 22 April 1845.

MY DEAR FRIEND:

YOU remember the old fable of “The Man and the Lion,” where the lion complained that he should not be so misrepresented “when the lions wrote history.”1Phillips loosely adapts a fable by Aesop, alternatively known as “The Lion and the Statue.” In it a lion and a man are arguing over which of them is stronger. The man shows the lion a statue of Hercules overpowering a lion and ripping the lion’s mouth apart. The lion replies that the statue proves nothing, since it was a man who made it, and the outcome would be different if a lion had created it. The Fables of Aesop, Selected, Told Anew, and Their History Traced by Joseph Jacobs (London, 1922), 85.

I am glad the time has come when the “lions write history.” We have been left long enough to gather the character of slavery from the involuntary evidence of the masters. One might, indeed, rest sufficiently satisfied with what, it is evident, must be, in general, the results of such a relation,

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without seeking farther to find whether they have followed in every instance. Indeed, those who stare at the half-peck of corn a week, and love to count the lashes on the slave’s back, are seldom the “stuff” out of which reformers and abolitionists are to be made. I rememer that, in 1838, many were waiting for the results of the West India experiment,2Following vigorous agitation by abolitionists, the British Parliament enacted the Emancipation Act of 1833, which began the gradual abolition of slavery in the colonies of the West Indies. At that time, enslaved children under the age of six became free. All others served apprenticeships of up to six years, with the option to purchase immediate freedom at any time. The compromise satisfied few people completely, but slave owners received a total of £20,000,000 from the British government, the apprenticeship program calmed the fears of whites who opposed immediate emancipation, and abolitionists recognized the Emancipation Act as the first major step towarderadication of slavery. For many years British and American abolitionists celebrated West Indian Emancipation Day on 1 August. William A. Green, British Slave Emancipation: The Sugar Colonies and the Great Experiment, 1830–1865 (Oxford, Eng., 1976), 129–75; Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, 1:39–40n. before they could come into our ranks. Those “results” have come long ago; but, alas! few of that number have come with them, as converts. A man must be disposed to judge of emancipation by other tests than whether it has increased the produce of sugar,—and to hate slavery for other reasons than because it starves men and whips women,—before he is ready to lay the first stone of his anti-slavery life

I was glad to learn, in your story,3Phillips refers to Douglass’s autobiographical work, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (Boston, 1845), in which this letter was published as a foreword. Douglass Papers, ser. 2, 1:10–12. how early the most neglected of God’s children waken to a sense of their rights, and of the injustice done them. Experience is a keen teacher;4Pliny the Younger wrote: “Let me add what I have learned from the best of all teachers, experience.” Pliny the Younger, Letters, and Panegyricas [by] Pliny, trans. Betty Radice, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1969), 1:61. and long before you had mastered your A B C, or knew where the “white sails” of the Chesapeake were bound, you began, I see, to gauge the wretchedness of the slave, not by his hunger and want, not by his lashes and toil, but by the cruel and blighting death which gathers over his soul.

In connection with this, there is one circumstance which makes your recollections peculiarly valuable, and renders your early insight the more remarkable. You come from that part of the country where we are told slavery appears with its fairest features. Let us hear, then, what it is at its best estate—gaze on its bright side, if it has one; and then imagination may task her powers to add dark lines to the picture, as she travels southward to that (for the colored man) Valley of the Shadow of Death,5Ps. 23:4. where the Mississippi sweeps along.

Again, we have known you long, and can put the most entire confidence in your truth, candor, and sincerity. Every one who has heard you speak has felt, and, I am confident, every one who reads your book will feel, persuaded that you give them a fair specimen of the whole truth. No one-sided portrait,—no wholesale complaints,—but strict justice done, whenever individual kindliness has neutralized, for a moment, the deadly system with which it was strangely allied. You have been with us, too, some years, and can fairly compare the twilight of rights, which your race enjoy at the North, with that “noon of night”6Attributed to Dante Alighieri when he used it in Purgatorio (c. 1300), the phrase “noon at night,” often appearing in poetry, means midnight. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. Henry Francis Cary (New York, 1957), 172; Stevenson, Book of Proverbs, 1570. under which they labor south of Mason and Dixon’s line.7The British colonial government resolved disputes between Pennsylvania on the north and Maryland and Virginia on the south by sending English surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon to determine and mark the precise borders between these colonies in 1763. This border later became known as the traditional boundary between the North and South. Hubertis M. Cummings, The Mason and Dixon Line: Story for a Bicentenary, 1763–1963 (Harrisburg, Pa., 1962). Tell whether, after all, the half-free colored man of Massachusetts is worse off than the pampered slave of the rice swamps!

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In reading your life, no one can say that we have unfairly picked out some rare specimens of cruelty. We know that the bitter drops, which even you have drained from the cup,8Facing crucifixion, Jesus asked God to let this cup pass from him, but said he would follow God’s will. Matt. 26:39, 42, Mark 14:36. are no incidental aggravations, no individual ills, but such as must mingle always and necessarily in the lot of every slave. They are the essential ingredients, not the occasional results, of the system.

After all, I shall read your book with trembling for you. Some years ago, when you were beginning to tell me your real name and birthplace, you may remember I stopped you, and preferred to remain ignorant of all. With the exception of a vague description, so I continued, till the other day, when you read me your memoirs. I hardly knew, at the time, whether to thank you or not for the sight of them, when I reflected that it was still dangerous, in Massachusetts, for honest men to tell their names! They say the fathers, in 1776, signed the Declaration of Independence with the halter about their necks.9Early US. historian Jared Sparks attributed the statement “we must indeed all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately” to Benjamin Franklin at the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Carl Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin (Garden City, N.Y., 1941), 551–52. You, too, publish your declaration of freedom with danger compassing you around. In all the broad lands which the Constitution of the United States overshadows, there is no single spot,—however narrow or desolate,—where a fugitive slave can plant himself and say, “I am safe.” The whole armory of Northern Law has no shield for you. I am free to say that, in your place, I should throw the MS. into the fire.

You, perhaps, may tell your story in safety, endeared as you are to so many warm hearts by rare gifts, and a still rarer devotion of them to the service of others. But it will be owing only to your labors, and the fearless efforts of those who, trampling the laws and Constitution of the country under their feet, are determined that they will “hide the outcast,”10Isa. 16:3. and that their hearths shall be, spite of the law, an asylum for the oppressed, if, some time or other, the humblest may stand in our streets, and bear witness in safety against the cruelties of which he has been the victim.

Yet it is sad to think, that these very throbbing hearts which welcome your story, and form your best safeguard in telling it, are all beating contrary to the “statute in such case made and provided.” Go on, my dear friend, till you, and those who, like you, have been saved, so as by fire, from the dark prison-house, shall stereotype these free, illegal pulses into statutes; and New England, cutting loose from a blood-stained Union, shall glory in being the house of refuge for the oppressed;—till we no longer merely “hide the outcast,” or make a merit of standing idly by while he is hunted our midst; but, consecrating anew the soil of the Pilgrims as an asylum for the oppressed, proclaim our welcome to the slave so loudly, that

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the tones shall reach every hut in the Carolinas, and make the broken-hearted bondman leap up at the thought of old Massachusetts.

God speed the day!

Till then, and ever, Yours truly,

WENDELL PHILLIPS.

PLSr: Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Boston, 1845), 13–46. Reprinted in NASS, 12 June 1845; Douglass Papers, ser. 2, 1:10–42.

Creator

Phillips, Wendell (1811–1884)

Date

1845-04-22

Publisher

Yale University Press 2009

Type

Letters

Publication Status

Published