God’s Law Outlawed: An Address Delivered in Manchester, New Hampshire, on January 24, 1854
GOD’S LAW OUTLAWED: AN ADDRESS DELIVERED IN
MANCHESTER, NEW HAMPSHIRE, ON 24 JANUARY 1854
Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 10 February 1854. Another text in Foner, Life and Writings,
5 : 306—12.
“Tomorrow Evening I begin a Series of appointments made for me in New
Hampshire,” Douglass wrote Calvin Stowe on 17 January 1854. His travels
in New Hampshire led him to Manchester, where he lectured before the New
Lyceum on 24 January 1854. It had been a decade, Douglass told the readers
of Frederick Douglass' Paper, since he had gone through Manchester “with
a bell” in his hand, “crying a notice” at the “top of” his “lungs” that he
“would speak at a certain point in the open air, (for no house could then be
obtained). ” Now, he mused, “the finest hall in the city is open, and crowds
attend. ” He addressed a large audience in the Manchester City Hall. Douglass
was pleased that he had been invited by the Lyceum, noting that “this appear-
ing before Lyceums, is something new for me; . . . It is, however, a cheering
sign, this inviting a colored man, and he a fugitive slave, to address societies
whose purpose is not less intellectual than moral. " Douglass to Dr. [Calvin
E.] Stowe, 17 January 1854, Frederick Douglass Collection, ICHi; Douglass
to T. W. Higginson, 17 January 1854, Frederick Douglass Collection, CtY;
FDP, 27 January, 3 February 1854.
Ten years since, I came to this city, and found it impossible to secure a
place in which to speak on the subject of American slavery. I rejoice at the
evident change that has taken place in the state of feeling in this part of New
Hampshire, and I take this meeting as an evidence of the onward progress
of the principles of freedom. I cannot hope, in view of the vast amount that
has been said by abler and more eloquent men, to bring before you any new
truths connected with this question. Indeed, it is scarcely necessary to
search for new truths, till the old truths which have been uttered from the
Declaration of Independence until now, shall have become recognized and
reduced to practice. Properly speaking, there is no such thing as new or old
truth. Error may be either new or old; it has its beginnings and must have its
endings. But truth is from everlasting to everlasting.1A phrase that recurs in PSS. 41: 13, 90: 2, 103: 17. Such is the great truth
of man’s right to liberty. It entered into the very idea of man’s creation. It
was born with us; and no laws, constitutions, compacts, agreements, or
combinations can ever abrogate or destroy it. It is so simple a truth that we
have no occasion to look into the mouldy records of the past, in order to
demonstrate it; it is written on all the powers and faculties of the human
soul; the record of it is in the heart of God, and, until tyrants can force the
portals of heaven, and wrest from the bosom of the Almighty the precious
record of human rights, slavery cannot be sanctioned by law or truth.
The great truth, which the anti-slavery men have been laboring to
establish, is, that every man is himself, and belongs to no one else. Some
eminent Doctors of Divinity have made the discovery that slavery is divine;
that the Almighty sanctions it. These men are doing more to undermine the
religious faith of the American people, and more to destroy reverence for
God, to encourage atheism and infidelity, than all the writings of Paine,2Thomas Paine.
Kneeland,3Abner Kneeland (1774—1844), Universalist minister and leader of Boston's First Society of Free Enquirers, lectured and wrote extensively on rationalism. In 1834, after three years as editor of the Boston Investigator, the first rationalist journal in the United States, he was tried for publishing “blasphemous and profane libel of and concerning God." Supported by prominent freethinkers, Kneeland successfully appealed his conviction for four years, although he eventually was compelled to serve sixty days in jail for his offense. DAB, 10: 457—58. Voltaire,4Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire. or all the infidels combined. Those who defend
slavery as an institution of the Almighty among men prove more than they
would like to prove, for if they succeed in proving this, then out of the great
heart of God, there is constantly springing all manner of torture and wrong
and crime. To maintain their assumption that slavery is divine, they must
also assume that the necessary conditions upon which it exists are also
divine. But what are the conditions necessary for the maintenance of this
system?
First, force is necessary. Men do not yield to the mandates of their
fellow men without cause. They do not bow down their necks to the yoke of
bondage because they love it. When you find a man in slavery, you may
know that force has been brought to bear upon him. He has been given to
understand that he must sustain that relation or die. And that is the language
of slavery to every slave in the United States. It is said he is kindly treated,
but what kindness can compensate for the loss of liberty! If the slaveholder
wanted the slave in the place of a bronze statue, merely to beautify and
adorn his household, he might possibly keep him; for we are a vain people,
and not without a pretty firm belief in our own beauty as a race. But they
don’t want us for any such purpose: they want us to work. They have a
slight prejudice against work themselves. They think it is all well enough
for cadaverous, lank and hungry-looking Yankees, as they call them; but,
for their part, they wish to be excused. There is gold in the earth, and it must
be dug out, but this digging is the rub which is to be rubbed by. They want
negroes to do this rubbing.
Secondly, they do not wish to pay for their work; they think this paying
to be a Yankee notion. In the absence of pay there must be force. The slave
must be made to feel that unless he shall work a worse thing will come unto
him. I admit there are slaveholders who do not treat their slaves as I have
indicated in my foregoing remarks, but they are the exceptions, and be-
sides, they are able to hold their slaves by terror inspired by cruelty inflicted
by other slaveholders.
Ignorance is necessary to the maintenance of slavery. Education is
incompatible with it. Give a slave a knowledge of geography, and he will
give you a lesson in locomotion. Give him a knowledge of the free states,
and he is off, not on his master’s legs, but on his own. The mental eye must
be bored out. His mind must not be enlightened. Do this and his chains
snap. There is not power enough in the southern or northern states, to bind
down intelligence among three millions of people. It is only by darkening
the soul, by crushing the spirit, by over-awing the man, that the slave is
kept in bondage.
I am not here, this evening, to dwell at length upon the nature and
character of slavery, or the arguments in its defence. Indeed, I have very
little to do with southern slavery or slaveholders now; but I have much to do
with the men and women of these northern states over which slavery has
spread its death-like pall. Slavery is here. The men who hold three millions
in bondage yonder, are here. The men who make slavery possible in this
republic are north of Mason and Dixon’s line. There is a purely slavery
party in the United States, that exists for slavery alone. Its members will be
Whigs or Democrats or neither, in order to maintain slavery. The purposes
of this party are briefly these: First, the silencing of all agitation on the
subject of slavery. Second, to extend slavery over this whole continent.
Third, to make slavery respected in every State of this Union. And its
fourth purpose is the expatriation of every free colored man in the US.
The first purpose avowed by this party is pretty distinctly avowed,
also, by the Whig and Democratic parties. They declare they are both in
favor of putting down agitation. These parties are united at this point, and I
believe they are at all other points, except in name. The Democrats go
for—democracy. Their platform says they will resist agitation. The Whigs
say they will discountenance, that is make-mouths at agitation.5In their 1852 platform the Democrats resolved to “resist all attempts at renewing, in congress or out of it, the agitation of the slavery question." The Whigs, “deprecating all further agitation" of the slavery question, pledged in their 1852 platform to "discountenance all efforts to continue or renew such agitation." The Democrats
hold that the compromise of 1850 was a final settlement. The Whigs
think it was a settlement final. The Whigs resolve they are in favor of
constitutional appropriations for internal improvements. The Democrats
say they are in favor of prohibiting unconstitutional appropriations. The
difference between them and their platforms, is the difference between
“Jenny come in” and “come in Jenny.” They both are for putting down
agitation, that our southern brethren may have peace. They have under-
taken to do what God Almighty has declared cannot be done. “There can
be no peace for the wicked, saith my God,”6Isa. 48: 22 or 57: 21. and the slaveholder can have
no peace. Daniel Webster lived long enough after the passage of the com-
promise measure to say—
“Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer”7Webster's alleged quotation of Richard III, act 1, sc. 1, lines 1—2 to characterize the results of the 1850 compromise has not been documented.
And Henry Clay lived to say—“Peace and tranquility reign throughout all
our borders,” but it was a very deceitful and unreal peace. If the mouths of
Northern men could be closed, the tongues of all anti-slavery men be cut
out, and all the literature, all the Uncle Tom’s Cabins and Bibles burned,
still the slaveholders could have no peace. Deep, down in his own soul God
has planted an abolition lecturer, and while he has that monitor he sleeps on
quivering heartstrings. Slaveholders and the abettors of slavery cannot, if
they would, stop talking on this subject. They tell us to be silent, still they
cannot be silent themselves. Like the wandering Jew they cannot stop. God
Almighty is at the bottom of this agitation, and Whigs and Democrats will
find it hard to stop what He commands to go forward.
I said the north was the great supporter of slavery. I feel I walk now not
on a free soil. The star spangled banner affords no protection. The fugitive
slave bill covers the whole country. The slave may be started from the far
west and chased to the far east; there is no valley so deep, no mountain so
high, no plain so boundless, no glen so secluded, no cave so secure, no spot
so sacred, as to give him shelter from the bloodhound and hunter. He may
pass into the New England states, to Concord and Bunker Hill, and ascend
that shaft,8The Bunker Hill Monument. and ask in the name of the first blood that was shed at its base for
protection; and even there, the hungry, biting bloodhound, and the master
with his accursed chains can go and snatch the bondman away. They can do
it right under the eave droppings of old Fanueil Hall, and under the stately
spires of your magnificent churches.
We are told the Fugitive Slave Law is constitutional; that there is a
clause in the constitution that authorizes the recapture of slaves. But the
clause is not there. When it says “no person shall be deprived of life,
liberty or property without due process of law,"9A phrase found in the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. it looks right. Men have
tried to see a recognition of this law there, but it is not. I used to think it was
there, but like the Irishman’s flea, “when I put my finger on it, it wasn't
thar. ” But there is an article in the Constitution, that declares “no person,
held to service or labor in one State under the laws thereof, shall in conse-
quence of any law be released from such service or labor, and shall be
delivered up,’'10This is an abridgement of Article IV, Section 2, which reads in full: “No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due." which article was intended to secure to every man what is
due to him. Mr. Webster, in his seventh of March speech, said this clause
of the constitution was introduced in consequence of a wide spread system
of apprenticeship and on account of a large class of redemptioners that
existed at that time.11Daniel Webster did not include the observation to which Douglass alludes in his speech of 7 March 1850. On other occasions, however, Webster did discuss the “common” colonial practice of returning “fugitives from service or labor." In the Senate on 17 July 1850 he reviewed his own state's early laws on runaway apprentices and read a 1644 letter from Sir William Berkeley in which the Virginia governor asked Governor John Winthrop of Massachusetts Bay for assistance in recovering some fugitive slaves, “as we constantly exercise the same offices in restoring runaways to you." At Buffalo, New York, on 22 May 1851, Webster asserted that “[f]ugitive slaves from Virginia to Massachusetts were restored by the people of Massachusetts. At that day there was a great system of apprenticeship at the North and many apprentices at the North, taking advantage of circumstances, and of vessels sailing to the South, thereby escaped; and they were restored on proper claim and proof. That led to a clear, express, and well-defined provision in the Constitution of the country on the subject." Webster repeated this explanation six days later at Albany, Congressional Globe, 31st Cong. 151 sess., Appendix, 269—76; Writings and Speeches of Daniel Webster, 4: 247, 272—73, 10: 166—67. There is nothing there to leave the impression that it
was intended for the recapture of slaves. And it is a strange fact, that, not
until the lapse of twenty-five years, was a slave returned from the north to
the south. This fugitive law is a modern invention; we have constitutions
outside of the constitution. I believe in denying everything to slavery, and
claiming everything for LIBERTY.
Some men have supposed every law pro-slavery until it has been
proved otherwise; they proceed on the presumption that the Constitution is
in favor of slavery. The great mistake of the anti-slavery men of modern
times, is that they have too easily given up the Constitution to slavery. If
our fathers introduced a clause into it for the purpose to return the
bondman, then they transcended their authority, they leaped out of the orbit
of their rights. Had your fathers any right to make slaves? Look over your
rights, and have you one which gives you liberty to make a slave of your
brother man? If you have not, your fathers had not, and they had no right to
command others to make them. Suppose in some fit of generosity I should
write each of you a title deed, giving you three hundred acres of clear blue
sky, all full of stars. What then? Why, the stars would stay up there, and
shine as bright as ever; the sky would not fall down. You could not appro-
priate it to yourself. So if] should give you a title deed to own somebody
else as property, would your right to that person hold good? You may pile
statutes to the heavens affirming the right of one class of men to hold another
in servitude, yet they will be null and void.
Now we have the fugitive slave law, how shall we get rid of it? I do not
think it will ever be repealed; it is too low and bad for that. It is not only to
be trampled upon and disregarded, but scorned and scouted at by every man
and woman. It was enacted for the basest of purposes; it was to humble you;
to make you feel that the South could command you, and make you run on
the track of the bondman and hunt him down.
A law of this kind is to be met with derision; and if the poor slave,
escaping from his pursuer, shall find himself unable to get beyond the reach
of the tyrant, and he should turn round and strike him down to the earth,
there is something in the heart of universal manhood that will say, “You
served the villain right.”
This law goes directly against religious liberty. We hear much about
religious liberty in Tuscany, Rome and Russia; but you can point to no law
in Russia, Turkey, Austria or any of the Papal States that can equal this law
in its warfare against religious liberty, if this liberty means the liberty to
practice Christianity. The law tells you good ministers and elders “We
shall expect you to forget the law of God at the ballot box, and enforce the
law of the Devil. ” To be sure it does not strike down any of the ordinances
of religion, but it strikes down man. There is no other system of religion so
benevolent and merciful as Christianity! It reaches down its long, benevo-
lent arm through every grade of suffering and seizes the last link in the
chain and says, “Stand up; thou art a man and brother.” But this law makes
Christianity a crime; it has made the law of God an outlaw. It tells ministers
they shall no longer learn their duty to their fellow men from the Bible, but
from the statute book. There comes the slave from Alabama. He comes in
the dark night—he dare not trust himself by moonlight—he travels toward
the north star—
“Star of the North, I look to thee.
While on I press—for well I know
Thy light and truth shall make me free.
Thy light, which no poor slave deceiveth,
Thy truth, which all my soul believeth."12Douglass slightly misquotes a stanza from “The Fugitive Slave's Apostrophe to the North Star" by John Pierpont (1785—1866), activist Unitarian minister of Boston's Hollis Street Church from 1819 to 1845. Douglass reprinted the poem, composed in 1839, in the first issue of the North Star. John Pierpont, The Anti-Slavery Poems of John Pierpont (Boston, 1843), 29-33; NS, 3 December 1847; DAB, 14: 586—87.
On he comes, he reaches us, he comes to the door of a Christian, and
says, “Give me bread and shelter or I die; ” but the law ofthe country says,
if you do that you shall have a home in a cold, damp cell, and shall see the
light of day through grated windows for six months, besides paying a fine
of $1000.
I wish Americans did not love office so well. It is strange how fascinat-
ing it is, however mean it may be. How many men at the north have made
shipwreck of their principles, honor, and everything else, while listening to
the promises of office! It makes me think of a dog I once saw. A fellow held
up a biscuit before him and said “Speak,” and the dog spoke. “Stand up,”
and he stood up. “Roll over,” and he did so, and the fellow, very compla-
cently, put the biscuit in his pocket, and said, “Now go and lay down."
This is the way southerners have treated northern statesmen. They have
told him to “Speak,” and they have stood up and spoken for slavery. Then
they said “Roll over,” and they have rolled over, and cast off their old
principles of freedom. Then they say, “Go and lay down forever—you are
of no further service.” It is time northern men should wake up. There is no
need of allowing the slave power to control you any longer. It is degrada-
tion intensified for you to suffer yourselves to be the vassals of women
whippers, and the dupes of northern aspirants for office and power.