Men and Brothers: An Address Delivered in New York, New York, on May 7, 1850
MEN AND BROTHERS: AN ADDRESS DELIVERED IN
NEW YORK, NEW YORK, ON 7 MAY 1850
New York Herald, 8 May 1850 and National Anti-Slavery Standard, 23 May 1850. Other
texts in New York Daily Tribune, 8 May 1850; New York Semi-Weekly Express, 10 May
1850; Pennsylvania Freeman, 16 May 1850; National Anti-Slavery Standard, 16 May
1850; Liberator, 24 May 1850; Anti-Slavery Bugle, 25 May 1850; Garrison and Garrison,
Garrison Life, 3: 294-95.
Excited, perhaps, by the stormy discussions taking place in Congress over
what was eventually to become the Compromise of 1850, several New York
newspapers accelerated their attacks on abolitionists just prior to the sixteenth
anniversary meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society in that city. James
G. Bennett, whom the Liberator dubbed “the miscreant editor of that polluted
journal,” urged those readers of his New York Herald opposed to such
“dangerous assemblies” to “enter the arena of discussion, and send out the
true opinion of the public.” The Daily Globe predicted that should Douglass
repeat his “Syracuse treason” of 17 January 1850 in New York “and any
man arrest him in his diabolical career, and not injure him, thousands will
exclaim in language of patriotic love for the Constitution and the rights of the
South, ‘DID HE NOT STRIKE THE VILLAIN DEAD?’ ” William Lloyd
Garrison, the Society's president, aware of the possible dangers awaiting his
followers when they convened at the Broadway Tabernacle on 7 May 1850,
wrote his wife, “That our meeting will be a stormy one, I have little doubt—
perhaps brutal and riotous in the extreme.” Garrison opened the session at
10:00 A.M. and became the first speaker to be interrupted by the antics of
Isaiah Rynders and his gang, who rushed onto the platform “like a flock of
unclean birds.” The pandemonium created by their “hooting, groaning,
hissing, yelling and low ribaldry” continued throughout the meeting. “In the
very midst of this,” Douglass later wrote, “the Hutchinson family . . . commenced
one of their plaintive and heart-touching songs; but this only provoked
louder demonstrations.” Despite the uproar, the Reverend William H.
Furness, a certain Dr. Grant, Douglass, and Samuel Ringgold Ward managed
to speak. Grant, the “selected champion” of the mob, attempted to prove,
in a garbled and unintentionally humorous fashion, that blacks were descended
from monkeys. He was immediately followed by Douglass, “prompt as a
steel-trap when it is touched.” When the crowd attributed Douglass’s undeniable
wit and eloquence to his white father, Ward rose and, “exhibiting a
gigantic frame as black as midnight,” asked, “What do you think of me,
then?” “That’s the genuine article, and no mistake!” exclaimed Rynders.
The Anti-Slavery Bugle reported that the meeting adjourned at 1:00 PM.
“entirely satisfied. . . with Mr. Bennett’s efforts in its behalf, and not ungrateful
to Captain Rynders and his friends for the spectacle they had made of
themselves for the amusement of the public.” Garrison to Helen E. Garrison,
7 May 1850, idem to Editor of the New York Daily Tribune, 13 May 1850,
idem to Editor of the Boston Transcript [17 May 1850], idem to Editor of the
Boston Transcript [31 May 1850], in Merrill and Ruchames, Garrison Letters,
4: 6-27; Lib., 10, 17, 31 May 1850; Boston Emancipator and Republican,
16 May 1850; NS, 16, 30 May 1850; ASB, 18 May 1850; New York
Times, 14 January 1885; Garrison and Garrison, Garrison Life, 3: 272-312;
Merrill, Against Wind and Tide, 257-61; Thomas, Liberator, 362-66.
†At this point, NASS, 23 May 1850, reads: “After much interruption and threats from Rynders and his gang, who stood by Mr. Douglass during his speech, as if to deter him from expressing his opinions freely, Mr. D. came forward and said: " (Loud cries for Douglass now were raised—Frederick Douglass came
forward to speak to Captain Rynders,1Isaiah Rynders (1804-85), New York City gang leader and Tammany Hall boss of the sixth ward, was a powerful figure throughout the late antebellum era. Of German and Irish background, Rynders was born in Waterford, New York, and attended school until about age twelve when he shipped out a deckhand on a riverboat running between Troy and New York City. He later either owned or commanded a small Hudson River sloop, retaining the title “Captain” for the rest of his career. Abandoning maritime pursuits around 1830, Rynders spent several years in the South where he gained a lasting, and possibly exaggerated, reputation as a duelist, gambler, and horse-racing enthusiast. In the late 1830s he returned to New York City and established himself in the slum area known as Five Points. Active in Democratic politics from the time of his arrival, Rynders opened a public house on Park Row that became a gathering place for local Tammany leaders as well as headquarters for the infamous Empire Club, a band of street toughs first recruited by Rynders to disrupt Whig political rallies during the election of 1844. Over the next dozen years Rynders's services to the Democratic party brought him a series of local federal offices. He was weigher in the New York Customs House under President James K. Polk, deputy surveyor of the Port of New York under Franklin Pierce, and United States marshal for the Southern District of New York under his personal friend James Buchanan. When not intimidating political opponents, Rynders and his followers participated in a number of rowdy civil disturbances, including the bloody Astor Place Opera House riots of May 1849. A staunch defender of slavery, Rynders became the nemesis of New York abolitionists during the 1840s and l850s, periodically disrupting their meetings with tactics he had perfected in the political arena. As early as 1857, however. he began to lose his grip on the Five Points gangs, and, although a Copperhead during the Civil War, he had to appeal for police protection during the 1863 draft riots. Rynders remained active in New York Democratic politics after the war, holding a variety of minor city and county offices throughout the 1860s and 1870s. A venture in breeding horses at a New Jersey farm failed, and during his last years Rynders “wandered around his old haunts disconsolate,“ reminiscing about the antebellum days and denouncing William Marcy Tweed and his Tammany cohorts. Although known as a “profane man," Rynders effortlessly quoted from the Bible and the plays of Shakespeare. New York Times, 14 January 1885; New York Tribune, 14 January 1885; PaF, 17 May 1849; Herbert Asbury, The Gangs of New York (New York, 1928), 43-45; James McCague, The Second Rebellion: The Story of the New York City Draft Riots of 1863 (New York, 1968), 118. and a crowd behind him stood close
by at his elbow. Some talking took place, sotto voce. As Douglass was
about to begin Captain Rynders was heard to say, “Don’t speak
disrespectfully—if you do, I’ll knock you down.” Douglass replied, “No
I won’t,” which at first we thought was, “No you won’t.” (We understand
Captain R[ynders] said that if he spoke disrespectfully of the South, or
Washington or Patrick Henry, or of the President, then he would knock him
down.)
F. Douglass then, with Captain Rynders at his elbow, began as follows:)2From New York Herald, 8 May 1850.
There is no danger of our being thrown into confusion by a monkey.
Mr. Chairman, our Anti-Slavery principles have made but little progress if
to-day ’s demonstration is to be taken as evidence. We are here—I am here,
for one, the representative of an enslaved and slandered people. I say I
belong to a people so degraded, and so unprotected by law and by public
opinion, that almost the lowest and meanest may insult us with impunity. In
our community, Sir, at Rochester, we don’t know a white man who will so
far demean himself as to insult a negro. I throw out this remark in order that
you may know in what light I should regard the man who would offer me an
insult. The fact is, I, who have endured the whip of the slaveholder, who
bear the marks of the lash upon my back, who have been driven to the slave
market in the town of Easton, Talbot County, Maryland, and exposed for
sale, like a brute beast, to the highest bidder—l cannot well appreciate an
insult. Therefore, let no man hope to succeed in insulting me. We have
heard all that can be said against the humanity of the negro, from one who
deals with the matter scientifically. He (Mr. Grant)3Mr. Grant, referred to variously as “Professor” or “Doctor,” has not been identified. William Lloyd Garrison reportedly recognized him as a former pressman from the Liberator office, but no corroborating evidence on this point has come to light. The published summaries of Grant 's remarks suggest that he may have been a physician or at least someone familiar with ethnological writings. The New York Semi-Weekly Express, 10 May 1850, gives the best account of Grant's remarks: “PROFESSOR GRANT then came forward. He wanted to allude to certain facts in natural history, upon which this whole subject of abolitionism rests. Then follows sundry very funny anecdotes—likening the monkey species of animal to the abolitionists etc. He called upon his hearers to look at the black and white colors which distinguished this audience. The mixing together of these black and white people was repugnant to nature and to nature ’s God. He referred to Professor Agassiz and other scientific men, philanthropists and philosophers, to show that the colored gentlemen here did not belong to the human species (confusion and hisses). All natural history pointed to this conclusion. It could be easily proved; nothing was clearer, nothing more conclusive. These black people, which we see about us, here, are not of us; common sense corroborates it. A long and very learned dissertation upon animal life and its origin, to establish these interesting principles. (All the while a great uproar prevailing.) The various properties of the Armadillo, the Anaconda, and the Shell Fish were examined, very lucidly and amusingly, to the reaffirmation of the issue already made,—that the BLACK man was not of our species. The Professor occupied about an hour with his scientific examination of the various properties of the human race, natural scientific and historical. . . . The professor put it, then, to his audience, to say, whether amalgamation was not monstrous—how revolting. (Great confusion.) It would overthrow the whole system of human society, and fill the earth with a race of monsters." Sometime prior to 1850 Grant had made similar arguments in a debate with James McCune Smith, a black physician trained in Scotland at the University of Glasgow. According to Frederick Douglass, Grant “undertook to argue the black race into extinction" but “was himself completely extinguished so that after his debate with Dr. Smith we find no trace of him." Garrison and Garrison, Garrison Life, 3 : 294; FDP, 3 June 1853. does not come here to
browbeat, nor to arouse your prejudice; no, he appeals to your understanding;
but look at me—look the negro in the face, examine his woolly head,
his entire physical conformation; I invite you to the examination, and ask
this audience to judge between me and that gentleman (Mr. Grant). Am I a
man?
Captain Rynders—“You are not a black man; you are only half a
nigger.”
Mr. Douglass—He is correct; I am, indeed, only half a negro, a
half-brother to Mr. Rynders (roars of laughter).4This exchange between Isaiah Rynders and Douglass was to become legendary in antislavery circles. The incident was recounted as late as 1883 at a meeting commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the New York City Anti-Slavery Society. Later that same year, Rynders acknowledged in a published interview that Frederick Douglass “did give me a shot, and it was as good a shot as I ever had in my life, when he said to me ‘Oh, then, I am only your half-brother!' " New York Times, 14 January 1885.
Now, here I call for your special attention. Whence am I? From the
North or from the South? (A voice, “from the South, decided-ly.”) Was I
bred among Abolitionists or Slaveholders? Slaveholders! Let me stick a pin
here. Yes, the son of a Slaveholder stands before you, by a colored
mother—a mother as dearly beloved as though she had been white as the
driven snow. I say I am from the South, originated among slaveholders. To
whom, then, should you preach [against] amalgamation? From my own
experience, I can safely say that the portion of this country given up to
wholesale amalgamation lies South of Mason and Dixon’s line. The
slaveholders believe, and, what is more, protect themselves, in the right to
indulge in amalgamation to any extent they may see fit. They have so
framed the laws, with regard to their female slaves, that if a black woman
should dare to lift her right hand in defence of her virtue, she may be struck
dead on the spot.
Capt. Rynders—“It is false; there is no such law in the South. ”
Mr. Douglass—Yes, in the State of Virginia, there is. If a black man
there should raise his hand to strike a white man, he may be killed for doing
so.5The South Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia statutes to which Douglass refers appear in [Weld], American Slavery, 144-45, 149, and Stroud, Laws Relating to Slavery, 1st ed., 109.
I want this audience to hear one who will follow me (Mr. Phillips).6Wendell Phillips. I
prefer giving place to another. I feel, however, that it is due to you and to
myself to prove my first assertion: that we are not only an enslaved, but a
slandered people, everywhere spoken against as low, vicious and de-
graded, incapable of elevation and improvement. The press of this and
other cities have expressed themselves to this effect. We have been declared
too low in the scale of humanity, and we have been tauntingly asked,
Why we don’t leave this country and do something to show ourselves men.
And this has been asked by the New York Tribune, a paper from which we
might expect anything else. It would be presuming too much on the ignorance
of the editor of the Tribune to suppose that he does not know why we
ought to leave this country, where we are sold like beasts in the market,
stripped of our rights and privileges, and our names, which may be inscribed
on the Lamb’s Book of Life,7An allusion to Rev. 21: 27. sacrilegiously placed on the ledger.
Wherever we move, we are confronted by an almost invincible and
overwhelming prejudice that crushes our spirits and prevents us making
that progress which those gentlemen taunt us with the want of. I say to Mr.
Greeley, and all others who taunt us thus, remove the obstacles that lie in
our path.8Horace Greeley (1811-72), journalist, reformer, and Republican politician, was the founder and lifelong editor of the New York Tribune. Born in Amherst, New Hampshire, Greeley moved to New York City in 1831 and became coeditor of a small literary periodical in 1834. With the sponsorship of William H. Seward and Thurlow Weed, Greeley soon entered the field of political journalism. editing Whig campaign weeklies in 1838 and again in 1840. The next year he launched the Tribune, which quickly outstripped its local competitors and attained a large circulation throughout the North. In addition to promoting a panoply of social causes ranging from Fourienism to the abolition of capital punishment, the Tribune under Greeley became the leading editorial voice of the Republican party during the 1850s. Openly hostile to abolitionism during the early 1840s, Greeley grew steadily more radical on the slavery issue, but his racial attitudes mirrored the ambivalence of many northern free-labor spokesmen. Greeley felt blacks deserved legal equality and a fair chance to compete in the marketplace, but he doubted that Negroes as a group were capable of taking full advantage of such opportunities. Thus, during the 1840s and 1850s, Greeley worked to extend equal suffrage to New York Negroes while simultaneously accepting that blacks were an “indolent, improvident, servile, and licentious” race incapable of achieving social equality with whites. In his Recollections Greeley claims to have rejected colonization during the mid-1830s, but he actually gave periodic support to emi grationist schemes throughout the antebellum era, and clashed repeatedly with Frederick Douglass, James McCune Smith, and other black leaders over the issue. In the present speech Douglass probably refers to Greeley’s Tribune editorial of 3 May 1850 in which Greeley interpreted black reluctance to support colonization as evidence of a lack of collective initative for self-betterment: “[W]hether the Black Race see fit to colonize Africa or not, we insist that they ought to colonize somewhere." Greeley wrote: “Heaven's smiles are for the valiant, the heroic, the self-denying; and the Race which is content with cast off clothes, so that they come easy and require no forecast, will always hold a servile position, whether slaves by law or not." Glyndon G. Van Deusen, Horace Greeley: Nineteenth Century Crusader (Philadelphia, 1953), 102-03, 381; Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York, 1970), 262-63, 297-300; Ralph Ray Fahrney, Horace Greeley and the Tribune in the Civil War (Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 1936), 60n, 131; Horace Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life (New York, 1869), 284-86; New York Daily Tribune, 3 May 1850, 22, 30 August 1851; NS, 13 June 1850; DAB, 7:528-34. I do not wish to be disrespectful to any man, although I have a
name for using harsh language. There is no danger of my using such
towards persons for whom I cherish the profoundest respect.
Capt. Rynders—“Oh no, certainly not.”
Mr. Douglass—No, not even to my half-brother here (Rynders). Those
who ask us why we don’t learn trades, or do something to make ourselves
respectable, do not seem to know the difficulties under which the negro
labors from day to day. When I was a slave in the South, and the property of
Capt. Auld, I earned for that dear man about $9 a week, at my trade, as a
caulker, as well as if my skin were as white as his. But the moment I landed
in New Bedford, eleven years ago, and asked for employment, I was told
by an anti-slavery ship-builder there, who had a vessel on the stocks to be
caulked, that if he should even venture to send me on that ship, every white
man would leave him, and he could not get her ready for sea. Go where I
would, I could not get employment at my trade. My case was the case of
hundreds of fugitives. I am a fugitive, and I glory in the name. Kossuth9Louis Kossuth (1802-94), lawyer, politician, and Magyar nationalist, led the 1848 revolution for Hungarian independence from Hapsburg rule. A member ofthe Hungarian Diet when the revolution began, Kossuth served as president of the Committee of National Defense before becoming governor of the short-lived Hungarian Republic in April 1849. When Austrian and Russian forces broke the back of Hungarian resistance in August 1849, Kossuth fled to exile and subsequent confinement in Turkey. The Hungarian leader's plight aroused widespread sympathy in the United States, and following his release by Turkish officials in 1851, Kossuth boarded a U.S. warship, which took him as far as Gibraltar on the first leg of a journey to America by way of England. Arriving in New York on 5 December 1851, he spent the next seven months in a triumphal tour of the United States. Abolitionists identified Kossuth with the cause of freedom and the rights of oppressed minorities and hoped to enlist his aid in the antislavery struggle. They were disappointed and irritated, however, when Kossuth chose to concentrate on the issue of Hungarian independence and flatly refused to “meddle with any domestic concerns of the United States." After leaving America in July 1852, Kossuth spent some eight years in England before settling in Italy, where he remained until his death. John H. Komlos, Louis Kossuth in America, 1851-1852 (Buffalo, 1973), 13-52; Donald S. Spencer, Louis Kossth and Young America: A Study of Sectionalism and Foreign Policy, 1848-1852 (Columbia, Mo., 1977), 65-81; J.O. Thorne, ed., Chambers Biographical Dictionary (Edinburgh, 1968), 746; New York Daily Tribune, 13 December 1851.
was a fugitive, you know—another half-brother of mine, said Mr. Douglass,
addressing Capt. Rynders. There is a prejudice, however, continued
the speaker, against fugitives, even against Daniel Webster—another
half-brother of mine.
Capt. Rynders—“He’s a three-quarter brother of yours; he’s as black
as you are. ”
Mr. Douglass—I say we are compelled by the circumstances of our
condition at present to get our living the best way we can in honesty;
and I believe, considering the narrow limits into which we are driven—
excluded from all trades and avocations—it is a miracle to me that we
are as well as we are—that we make as respectable an appearance as we do.
The Irishman but recently landed on these shores has greater privileges than
are enjoyed by us. We who dwell among you—we who have watered the
soil with our tears, and fertilized it with our blood—we only ask you to treat
us as well as you treat him. The first blood shed on Bunker’s Hill was that of
a black man. (A voice, “what color was it?”) A little darker than yourself!
If you are not indebted to us slaves, to whom are you indebted? Whose
labor raised the cotton for the shirts on your backs? Whose labor produced
the sugar that sweetens your coffee? The negro’s, and well you know it; and
we would do more for you, if you would let us. (A voice, “yes, you would
cut our throats for us.”) No, not cut your throats, but we would cut your
hair for you! No; the idea of cutting your throats is out of the question, for
we have been handling the razor for half a century, and have not yet cut
one. You do not object to the presence of the negro on account of the
offensive peculiarity he is said to possess when he appears in the livery of a
servant. That proves that the condition, not the man, is regarded, and that
labor is dishonored. Mr. Grant has told you that we are a doomed race in
this country—that we will soon die out—that our powers of procreation are
not equal to those of the white man.
Capt. Rynders—“lf you are going to speak on that subject, I advise
you to address yourself to the ladies.”
Mr. Douglass—Let us see how we die out. I believe that at the framing
of the Constitution there were 600,000 blacks in this country; now, there
are between 3 and 4,000,000.10The U.S. Census placed the Negro population at 757,181 in 1790 and at 3,638,808 in 1850. (A voice, “mongrels and all.”) Oh, yes,
you do mix us up most terribly; the mongrels all belong to you. We differ
very materially from the extinct races, and those becoming extinct. There is
something about the negro so buoyant, so tenacious of life, that it defies the
power of oppression to crush him. Load him with chains—make him toil
that another may reap the reward of his labor—sell his wife in the
market—tear his children from him, and still he lives, and moves, and has
his being.11Douglass adapts Acts 17: 28. Lift your foot from off his neck, and he will smile at you, and
try to teach you a lesson of humanity that you would find difficult to learn
were it not for the crushed victim that lies writhing at your feet. The
Indians, that noble race that once possessed this land, are fast passing from
existence; they look upon their home, now the home of the white man; they
look, with saddened eye, upon the graves of their fathers, profaned by the
careless tread of the stranger; and they see that there is a power working
their destruction, and they retreat before it. But the negro does not die out.
Capt. Rynders—“You are in error about the negro not dying out; they
are going fast in the free States.”
Mr. Douglass—He says I am mistaken—that we do not increase in the
North—that it is only in the South we increase. I am not certain as to the
truth of this. (A voice, “it is true.”) Well, and what if it is; it makes no real
difference; we are with you at all events, and all efforts to colonize us are in
vain, and, with the blessing of God, I say it is my intention to remain with
you—not to torture you, nor to do any injury to society, nor harm to any
man or good thing. If honesty will do anything for a community, I wish to
do my portion; if industry and perseverance be of any account, I want to
bring a black man’s share to the stock of excellence that exalts a nation. We
only want our rights.
It is said that in a state of slavery we increase, and in freedom we
decrease. Up in Rochester, they say, the negroes are most shockingly on
the increase. If it be true that we are decreasing, why then be uneasy about
us? Let us die without the aid of oppression; let us die a natural death. I have
heard something about the descent of the negro. I care not whether I am
descended from a man or a monkey. One thing, I have a head to think, and I
know that God meant I should exercise the right to think—that I have a
heart to feel, and a tongue to speak whatever that heart listeth, and God
meant that I should use that tongue in behalf of humanity and justice for
every man.