Let All Soil Be Free Soil: An Address Delivered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on August 11, 1852
LET ALL SOIL BE FREE SOIL: AN ADDRESS DELIVERED IN
PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA, ON 11 AUGUST 1852
Frederick Douglass' Paper, 20 August 1852. Other texts in New York Herald, 12 August
1852; Liberator, 20 August 1852; Foner, Life and Writings, 2: 206-09.
Some three hundred delegates representing a broad spectrum of political
antislavery attended the national convention of the Free Democratic party in
Pittsburgh on 11-12 August 1852, temporarily putting aside their differences
to nominate candidates for the offices of president and vice president in the
upcoming presidential contest. New York abolitionist Lewis Tappan and
Francis J. Le Moyne, a former president of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery
Society, urged all “Friends of Freedom” to attend the convention. The official
notice issued by Free Soiler Samuel Lewis, chairman of the committee
formed in Cleveland in September 1851 to call the convention, specifically
invited “Friends of the principles declared at [the] Buffalo” Free Soil convention
in 1848. Liberty party men, Liberty Leaguers, and Free Soilers, most
of whom now used the official party name of Free Democrat, responded to the
call, coming from all the free states except California, and from Delaware,
Maryland, Virginia, and Kentucky. In July Douglass had urged Gerrit Smith
to attend and was hopeful that the Pittsburgh convention could “be made to
occupy such a position as that the ‘Liberty party’ may properly vote for its
candidates.” On the first day of the convention, John P. Converse of Ohio
was presiding at a meeting of about two thousand nonvoting delegates assembled
in Masonic Hall, when Douglass’s appearance at the rear of the hall
prompted several members of the audience to call upon him to speak. The
New York Herald reported that he “proceeded to the platform with the air and
swagger of a man who said to himself—‘I’ll make you all hear, and feel me
too.’ He wore white trousers and a blue coat with brass buttons.” When
Douglass finished what the same reporter termed a “very temperate harangue,”
he returned to the meeting of the official delegates in Lafayette Hall.
He was by acclamation named one of the seven secretaries of the convention.
Even though by late September the Liberty party had withdrawn its support
of the convention’s nominees, John P. Hale and George W. Julian, Douglass’s
newspaper regularly carried the Hale/Julian banner for two months
before the election. FDP, 23 July, 17 September 1852; New York Daily
Times, 12 August 1852; New York Daily Tribune,12, 13 August 1852;
NASS, 19 August 1852; Douglass to Gerrit Smith, 15 July 1852, Gerrit Smith
Papers, NSyU; Blue, Free Soilers, 232-41; Sewell, Ballots for Freedom,
243-46; Quarles, FD, 148-49; Schuyler C. Marshall, “The Free Democratic
Convention of 1852,” PaH, 22: 146-67 (April 1955).
Gentlemen, I take it that you are in earnest, and mean all you say by this
call, and therefore I will address you. I am taken by surprise, but I never
withhold a word on such an occasion as this. The object of this Convention
is to organize a party, not merely for the present, but a party identified with
eternal principles and therefore permanent. I have come here, not so much
of a free soiler as others have come. I am, of course, for circumscribing and
damaging slavery in every way I can. But my motto is extermination—not
only in New Mexico, but in New Orleans—not only in California, but in
South Carolina. Nowhere has God ordained that this beautiful land shall be
cursed with bondage by enslaving men. Slavery has no rightful existence
anywhere. The slaveholders not only forfeit their right to liberty, but to life
itself. (Applause) The earth is God’s, and it ought to be covered with
righteousness, and not slavery. We expect this great National Convention
to lay down some such principle as this. What we want is not a temporary
organization, for a temporary want, but a firm, fixed, immovable, Liberty
Party. Had the old Liberty Party continued true to its principles, we never
should have seen such a hell-born enactment as the Fugitive Slave Law.
In making your Platform, nothing is to be gained by a timid policy. The
more closely we adhere to principle, the more certainly will we command
respect. Both National Conventions acted in open contempt of the anti-
slavery sentiment of the North, by incorporating, as the comer-stone of
their two platforms, the infamous law to which I have alluded1In 1852 both major parties held their national conventions in Baltimore, the Democrats meeting 1-6 June and the Whigs meeting 16-19 June. A resolution of the Democratic platform affirmed that the party would “abide by and adhere to a faithful execution of the acts known as the compromise measures" and judged that the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, because it was “designed to carry out an express provision of the constitution" could not "be repealed nor so changed as to destroy or impair its efficiency." The eighth article of the Whig platform pronounced the compromise measures, particularly the Fugitive Slave Law, a “settlement in principle and substance, of the dangerous and exciting question which they embrace" and pledged to "maintain them, and insist upon their strict enforcement. until time and experience shall demonstrate the necessity of further legislation to guard against the evasion of the law on one hand, and the abuse of their powers on the other, not impairing their present efficiency." Donald Bruce Johnson and Kirk H. Porter, comps, National Party Platforms, 1840-1972, 5th ed. (Urbana, Ill., 1973), 17, 21; Thomas H. McKee, ed., The National Conventions and Platforms of All Political Parties, 1789-1905, 6th ed., rev. (Baltimore, 1906), 74, 77.—a law
which, I think, will never be repealed—it is too bad to be repealed—a law
fit only to [be] trampled under foot (suiting the action to the word). The
only way to make the Fugitive Slave Law a dead letter is to make half a
dozen or more dead kidnappers. (Laughter and applause.) A half dozen
more dead kidnappers carried down South would cool the ardor of Southern
gentlemen, and keep their rapacity in check. That is perfectly right as long
as the colored man has no protection. The colored men’s rights are less than
those of a jackass. No man can take away a jackass without submitting the
matter to twelve men in any part of this country. A black man may be
carried away without any reference to a jury. It is only necessary to claim
him, and that some villain should swear to his identity. There is more
protection there for a horse, for a donkey, or anything, rather than a colored
man—who is, therefore, justified in the eye of God, in maintaining his
right with his arm.
A VOICE.—Some of us do not believe that doctrine.
DOUGLASS.—The man who takes the office of a bloodhound ought to
be treated as a bloodhound; and I believe that the lines of eternal justice are
sometimes so obliterated by a course of long continued oppression that it is
necessary to revive them by deepening their traces with the blood of a
tyrant. (Much applause.) This Fugitive Slave Law had the support of the
Lords,2John Chase Lord. and the Coxes,3Samuel H. Cox. the Tyngs,4Episcopal minister Stephen Higginson Tyng (1800-85) was the rector of St. George's Church in New York City for more than thirty years. A graduate of Harvard College, Tyng was ordained a priest in 1824 and held pastorates in the District of Columbia, Prince Georges County, Maryland, and Philadelphia, before settling in New York in 1845. He was a popular orator and an early promoter of religious education. Under his leadership, St. George's parish established mission schools among the poor of New York City's East Side. On 12 December 1850, Tyng delivered a Thanksgiving Day sermon at St. George's Church in which he expressed his hope that his generation would witness the regeneration of the globe by England and the United States: “The power given to these two nations of the Saxon race is a remarkable fact of this age. The keys of the earth have been committed to their charge. . . . Their united mission is to elevate [the world's] population to Gospel light and truth; to national liberty and to prosperous trade." Fearful lest the “dark cloud of inherited slavery" and disunion should thwart his country's providential mission, Tyng blamed radical abolitionists’ “violent eagerness for the immediate overthrow of the evil" of slavery for having heightened sectional tensions. He thought “unlimited and immediate emancipation upon our own soil" impossible and expressed confidence that abolition could only be achieved by “equitable, constitutional, and Christian means" together with a “complete and generous colonization of Africans in Africa." Stephen H. Tyng, Duty to Our Own Generation: A Thanksgiving Sermon . . . (New York, 1850), 15, 16, 25; ACAB, 6: 203; DAB, 19: 101-02 the Sharps5Daniel Sharp. and the flats. (Laughter.) It
is nevertheless a degradation and a scandalous outrage on religious liberty;
and if the American people were not sunk into degradation too deep for one
possessing so little eloquence as I do to describe, they would feel it, too.
This vile, infernal law does not interfere with singing of psalms, or any-
thing of that kind, but with the weightier matters of the law, judgment,
mercy, and faith. It makes it criminal for you, sir, to carry out the principles
of Christianity. It forbids you the right to do right—forbids you to show
mercy—forbids you to follow the example of the good Samaritan.6The parable of the good Samaritan is told in Luke 10 : 30-35.
Had this law forbidden any of the rites of religion, it would have been a
very different thing. Had it been a law to strike at baptism, for instance, it
would have been denounced from a 1000 pulpits, and woe to the politician
who did not come to the rescue. But, I am spending my strength for nought;
what care we for religious liberty? What are we—an unprincipled set of
knaves? (Laughter.) You feel it to be so. Not a man of you that looks a
fellow Democrat or Whig in the face, but knows it. But it has been said that
this law is constitutional—if it were, it would be equally the legitimate
sphere of government to repeal it. I am proud to be one of the disciples of
Gerrit Smith, and this is his doctrine: and he only utters what all law writers
have said who have risen to any eminence. Human government is for the
protection of rights; and when human government destroys human rights, it
ceases to be a government, and becomes a foul and blasting conspiracy; and
is entitled to no respect whatever.
It has been said that our fathers entered into a covenant for this slave-
catching. Who were your daddies? (Laughter) I take it they were men, and
so are you. You are the sons of your fathers; and if you find your fathers
exercising any rights that you don’t find among your rights, you may be
sure that they have transcended their limits. If they have made a covenant
that you should do that which they have no right to do themselves, they
transcended their own authority, and surely it is not binding on you. If you
look over the list of your rights, you do not find among them any right to
make a slave of your brother. (Many cries of “no, no, no”—-and “so say
we, all of us.”)
Well, you have just as good a right to do so as your fathers had. It is a
fundamental truth that every man is the rightful owner of his own body. If
you have no right to the possession of another man’s body. your fathers had
no such right. But suppose that they have written in a constitution that they
have a right, you and I have no right to conform to it. Suppose you and I had
made a deal to give away two or three acres of blue sky; would the sky fall—
and would anybody be able to plough it? You will say that this is an absurdity,
and so it is. The binding quality of law is its reasonableness. I am safe.
therefore, in saying, that slavery cannot be legalized at all. I hope, there-
fore, that you will take the ground that this slavery is a system, not only of
wrong, but is of a lawless character, and cannot be Christianized nor legal-
ized. (Applause)
Can you hear me in that end of the hall now? (Laughter and applause.) I
trust that this Convention will be the means of laying before the country the
principles of the Liberty Party, which I have the honor to represent, to some
extent, on this floor. Slavery is such a piracy that it is known neither to law
nor gospel—it is neither human nor divine—a monstrosity that cannot be
legalized. If they took this ground it would be the handwriting on the wall to
the Belshazzars of the South.7Douglass alludes to the end of the reign of Belshazzar, ruler of Babylon killed at the time of its capture in 539 B.C., as narrated in Dan. 5: 5-31. Douglas et al., The New Bible Dictionary, 139. It would strip the crime of its legality, and all
the forms of law would shrink back with horror from it. As I have always an
object when speaking on such subjects as this, I wish you to supply your-
selves with Gerrit Smith’s pamphlet on civil government, which I now hold
in my hand.8Gerrit Smith, The True Office of Civil Government (New York, 1851), reprinted a lecture which Smith had delivered in Troy, New York, on 14 April 1851. I thought you doubted the impossibility of legalizing slavery.
(Cries of no.)
Could a law be made to pass away any of your individual rights? No.
And so neither can a law be made to pass away the right[s] of the black man.
This is more important than most of you seem to think. You are about to
have a party, but I hope not such a party as will gather up the votes, here and
there, to be swallowed up at a meal by the great parties. I think I know what
some leading men are now thinking. We hear a great deal of the indepen-
dent, free democracy—at one time independent and another time
dependent—but I want always to be independent, and not hurried to and fro
into the ranks of Whigs or Democrats. It has been said that we ought to take
the position to gain the greatest number of voters, but that is wrong.
We have had enough of that folly. It was said in 1848 that Martin Van
Buren would carry a strong vote in New York; he did so but he almost
ruined us. He merely looked at us as into the pig-pen to see how the animal
grew; but the table was the final prospect in view; he regarded the Free Soil
party as a fatling to be devoured. (Great laughter.) Numbers should not be
looked to so much as right. The man who is right is a majority. He who has
God and conscience on his side, has a majority against the universe.
Though he does not represent the present state, he represents the future
state. If he does not represent what we are, he represents what we ought to
be. In conclusion, this party ought to extend a hand to the noble, self-
sacrificing patriot—glorious Kossuth.9Louis Kossuth. But I am a voting delegate, and
must now go to the convention. You will excuse me for breaking off so
abruptly.