Slavery, the Slumbering Volcano: An Address Delivered in New York, New York, on April 23, 1849
SLAVERY, THE SLUMBERING VOLCANO: AN ADDRESS
DELIVERED IN NEW YORK, NEW YORK, ON 23 APRIL 1849
National Anti-Slavery Standard, 3 May 1849. Other texts in Pennsylvania Freeman, 10
May 1849; Liberator, 11 May 1849; North Star, 11 May 1849; Foner, Life and Writings,
5 : 111-19.
On 23 April 1849, no fewer than twelve hundred black New Yorkers filled the
Shiloh Presbyterian Church on Prince and Marion streets to declare their
opposition to the American Colonization Society. The meeting was planned
after Alexander Crummell wrote from England to inform his black colleagues
in the United States about the Reverend John Miller’s attempt to organize
ACS auxiliaries in the British Isles. The New York meeting was called to
counter Miller’s frequent claim that free blacks favored emigration. Shiloh’s
pastor, the Reverend J. W. C. Pennington, was appointed chairman. George
T. Downing, Charles Lenox Remond, the Reverend Charles B. Ray, and
Charles L. Reason read and endorsed resolutions condemning colonization
and charging officials of the Liberian government with involvement in the
slave trade. Other platform guests included Boston Crummell and Tunis G.
Campbell. Douglass’s speech brought the protest meeting to a close. Before
the gathering separated at 11:00 P.M., it was announced that a second anti-
colonization rally would be held in the church on the following evening. NS,
27 April, 4 May 1849; Philadelphia Non-Slaveholder, 1 June 1849.
Mr. FREDERICK DOUGLASS—Mr. Chairman, there is no end to the devises
of our enemies. The failure of one only makes room for another. One is
scarcely defeated when another is invented. When driven from one point,
they plant themselves at another. They are as prolific of schemes as Egypt
was of frogs. In these circumstances we ought to be always on the look
out—armed at all points, and ready to march in any direction, and to meet
the enemy whether in this or any other country.
Of all the assaults which we have experienced during the last twenty
years, none have been more subtle and plausible than those emanating from
the American Colonization Society.1The American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Color in the United States, known as the American Colonization Society, was organized by New Jersey Presbyterian minister Robert Finley (1772-1817) in December 1816. Dedicated to settling free black volunteer emigrants in Africa, the Society, by 1821, had succeeded in establishing the colony of Liberia. The principal assumption of the Society was that blacks and whites were socially incompatible and, therefore, that the emigration of free blacks would promote the general welfare and encourage gradual emancipation of slaves. Receiving the support of prominent and influential men and eventually securing the patronage of the federal government, the Society was viewed by many free blacks as an anathema. After Liberia received its independence in 1847, the Society concentrated its efforts on supporting the new republic. Philip J. Staudenraus, The African Colonization Movement, 1816—1865 (New York, 1961); Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 3-8, 19; Leonard L. Richards, “Gentlemen of Property and Standing”: Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America (New York, 1970), 23-26; Louis R. Mehlinger, “The Attitude of the Free Negro Toward African Colonization,” JNH, 1: 276-301 (June 1916); Henry Noble Sherwood, “The Formation of the American Colonization Society,” JNH, 2: 209-28 (July 1917); Roman J. Zorn, “The New England Anti-Slavery Society: Pioneer Abolition Organization,”JNH , 43: 157-76 (July 1957).
Under the garb of philanthropy and religion its efforts to degrade us
have been as various as they have been grievous. Of the history of that
Society you have already been well informed, and with its origin you are
equally familiar. It is, as you are aware, the joint product of slaveholders of
the South and negro haters of the North, and fitly bears the image of both
parents. Embodying all the malignity of the slaveholder, and all the
negro-hating spirit of the Northerner, it is our ever vigilant and bitter
adversary. It has often changed its position, and assumed by turns all the
colours of the rainbow, but has never changed its essential character. It is
now, as it ever has been, a most deceitful and cunning scheme against the
peace and freedom of the coloured people of the land.
Sir, we are here to expose and denounce this Janus-faced enemy. And I
am glad to bear a humble share in this work. The special duty of this
meeting has already been well and honourably discharged, and I for one
have no fear of the result. Our humble words on the strong wings of the
winds, will be speedily wafted to the shores of England. They will
strengthen the hands of our faithful and able representative there,2Alexander Crummell. and
defeat the schemes of our subtle foe. What I have to say must be only by
way of amplification.
Is it not strange, sir, that a system which has been condemned by the
noble Wilberforce, exposed by the good and great Clarkson, and shattered
by the thunder-bolts of O’Connell—whose honoured graves are yet
scarcely green with the verdure of two summers—should so soon make its
appearance on the shores of old England?3William Wilberforce and Daniel O’Connell, among others, signed a protest against the American Colonization Society in 1833. By 1840, Thomas Clarkson had also withdrawn his support from the society. Lib., 12 October 1833, 25 September 1840. The audacity of this Society is
only equalled by its malignity. Scourged and driven from the shores of
England by Wilberforce, Clarkson and O’Connell, it seems to have waited
impatiently for their removal to the land of spirits, to return again to its
work of meanness and deception. As usual, it has gone abroad with a smile
on its cheek, and a lie in its mouth. In the semblance of [an] angel, and the
reality of a demon—professing sympathy for the coloured people of
America—it labours to drive us from our home and country.
Sir, it does not seek to do this by open and fair means. If such were true,
we should have less fault to find. It does not propose to compel us to leave
this country by force and arms, but seeks to bring about a state of things
unfavourable to our remaining in this country. It does not tell us to go—but
tells us we had better go—that we can never enjoy equal rights or peace in
this country—that we are a doomed people, and that no efforts can save us
while we remain here; and sometimes goes so far as to intimate that if we do
not go now, the time is not far distant when we may be compelled to go.
Such, sir, are the sentiments of that Society; and it is these discouraging,
insulting and menacing sentiments which have strengthened preju-
dice, and supported Slavery in this country. But for the efforts of this
Society, I believe there would, long before this, have been a united and
determined effort on the part of the whole North against Slavery. It has kept
alive this prejudice. The agents, and presses, and reports of that Society
carefully kept out of sight all the evidences of our improvement and only
represented us as degraded, ignorant and besotted.
Mr. Chairman, the fundamental, and—as Daniel Webster would
say—the everlasting objection to Colonization is this: that it assumes that
the coloured people, while they remain in this country, can never stand on
an equal footing with the white population of the United States. This
objection, I say, is a fundamental one; it lies at the very basis of this
enterprise, and, as such, I am opposed to it, have ever been opposed to it,
and shall, I presume, ever continue to oppose it. It takes the ground that the
coloured people of this country can never be free, can never improve here;
and it is spreading throughout the country this hope-destroying, this misan-
thropic doctrine, chilling the aspirations of the coloured people them-
selves, and leading them to feel that they cannot, indeed, ever be free in this
land. In this respect the influence of the Colonization scheme has been most
disastrous to us. It has advocated the most stringent persecution in some
instances towards coloured men. But let me, sir, read a resolution:
Resolved, That if it be left optional with a slave to go to Africa or not,
we advise him not to go, but rather to remain here and add to the number of
those who may yet imitate the example of our fathers of ’76.
I do not mean to say here, my friends, that this result is a desirable one—
the result to which I look—but I look to it as an inevitable one, if the nation
shall persevere in the enslavement of the coloured people. I have not the
slightest doubt but that at this moment, in the Southern States, there are skil-
fully-contrived and deeply-laid schemes in the minds at least of the leading
thinkers there, for the accomplishment of this very result. The slaveholders
are sleeping on slumbering volcanoes, if they did but know it; and I want
every coloured man in the South to remain there and cry in the ears of the
oppressors, “Liberty for all or chains for all.” (Great applause.) I want
them to stay there with the understanding that the day may come—I do not
say it will come, I do not say that I would hasten it, I do not say that I would
advocate the result or aim to accomplish or bring it about,—but I say it may
come; and in so saying, I only base myself upon the doctrine of the Scrip-
tures, and upon human nature, and speaking out through all history. “Those
that lead into captivity shall go into captivity.”4A paraphrase of Rev. 13: 10. “Those that take the
sword shall perish by the sword.”5A paraphrase of portions of Rev. 13: 10 or Matt. 26: 52. Those who have trampled upon us for
the last two hundred years, who have used their utmost endeavours to crush
every noble sentiment in our bosom, and destroy our manly aspirations;
those who have given us blood to drink for wages, may expect that their
turn will come one day. It was in view of this fact that Thomas Jefferson,
looking down through the vista of the future, exclaimed: “I tremble for my
country when I reflect that God is just, and that his justice cannot sleep
forever.”6Douglass paraphrases a line from Notes on the State of Virginia, first published in 1785. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill. N.C., 1955), 163. He saw even through the distance of time through which he
looked, down beyond the present to a future period, when the spirit of
liberty and manhood would lead the slave to bare his bosom and struggle in
his chains for Freedom, as was illustrated by the fathers of ’76 (applause);
and seeing this he said “I tremble for my country.”
The Colonization scheme aims, they say, to prevent or avert this disas-
trous consequence. Sir, such an effort is unscriptural, it is unchristian.
There is no other way whereby men can escape the penalty of their crimes
but by repentance. But instead of preaching repentance to slaveholders,
these Colonizationists are proposing to remove away from them the object
of their hatred without dislocating the hatred itself. I say then, that it is
unchristian and unscriptural. Those slaveholders must take the conse-
quence of their crime. Man loves liberty and will ever try to regain it.
“O, tell me not that I am blest,
Nor bid me glory in my lot—
That plebeian freemen are opprest
With wants and woes that you are not.
Out on such kindness, I would be
The wreck of fortune to be free.
Go, let a cage with grates of gold,
And pearly roof, the eagle-hold;
Let dainty viands be his fare,
And give the Captive tenderest care;
But say, in luxury’s limits pent,
Find you the king of birds content?
No, oft he’ll sound the startling shriek,
And dash the grates with angry beak.
Precarious freedom’s far more dear,
Than all the prison’s pamp’ring cheer!
He longs to see his Eyrie’s seat,
Some cliff on ocean’s lonely shore,
Whose old bare tops the tempests beat
And round whose base the billows roar,
When tossed by gales they yawn like graves,—
He longs for joys to skim those waves;
Or rise through tempest-shrouded air,
All thick and dark with wild winds swelling,
To brave the lightning’s lurid glare,
And talk with thunders in their dwelling."7The most complete text of this unattributed poem, entitled “Give Me Freedom: A Fragment,” appears in NS, 21 August 1848.
The cry of the slave goes up to heaven, to God, and unless the Ameri-
can people shall break every yoke, and let the oppressed go free, that spirit
in man which abhors chains, and will not be restrained by them, will lead
those sable arms that have long been engaged in cultivating, beautifying,
and adorning the South, to spread death and devastation there. (Great
applause.) Some men go for the abolition of Slavery by peaceable means.
So do I; I am a peace man; but I recognize in the Southern States at this
moment, as has been remarked here, a state of war. Sir, I know that I am
speaking now, not to this audience alone, for I see reporters here, and I
learn that what is spoken here is to be published, and will be read by
Colonizationists and perhaps by slaveholders. I want them to know that at
least one coloured man in the Union, peace man though he is, would greet
with joy the glad news should it come here to-morrow, that an insurrection
had broken out in the Southern States. (Great applause.) I want them to
know that a black man cherishes that sentiment—that one of the fugitive
slaves holds it, and that it is not impossible that some other black men (a
voice—we are all so here) may have occasion at some time or other, to put
this theory into practice. Sir, I want to alarm the slaveholders, and not to
alarm them by mere declamation or by mere bold assertions, but to show
them that there is really danger in persisting in the crime of continuing
Slavery in this land. I want them to know that there are some Madison
Washingtons in this country.8In 1841 Madison Washington led a slave mutiny aboard the Creole. (Applause) The American people have been
accustomed to regard us as inferior beings. The Colonization Society has
told them that we are inferior beings, and that in consequence of our calm
and tame submission to the yoke which they have imposed upon us; to their
chains, fetters, gags, lashes, whipping-posts, dungeons and bloodhounds,
we must be regarded as inferior—that there is no fight in us,—and that is
evidence enough to prove that God intended us to retain the position which
we now occupy. I want to prevent them from laying this flattering unction
to their souls. There are coloured persons who hold other views, who
entertain other feelings, with respect to this matter.
As an illustration of the spirit that is in the black man, let me refer to the
story of Madison Washington. The treatment of that man by this Govem-
ment was such as to disgrace it in the eyes of the civilized world. He
escaped some years ago from Virginia, and succeeded in reaching Canada,
where, nestled in the mane of the British Lion, the American Eagle might
scream in vain above him, for from his bloody beak and talons he was free.
There he could repose in quiet and peace. But he remembered that he had
left in bondage a wife, and in the true spirit of a noble-minded and noble-
hearted man, he said: while my wife is a slave I cannot be free. I will leave
the shores of Canada, and God being my helper, I will go to Virginia, and
snatch my wife from the bloody hands of the oppressor.9Douglass's information concerning Madison Washington‘s early life may have come from Lib., 10 June 1842. He went to
Virginia, against the entreaties of friends, against the advice of my friend
Gurney,10Quaker evangelist, educator, scholar, and philanthropist Joseph John Gurney (1788-1847), born in Earlham Hall near Norwich, England, came from a prosperous commercial family. Tutored at Oxford University for two years, Gurney entered his family‘s banking business in 1805, an association he was to maintain until his death. Like his brother-in-Iaw Thomas Fowell Buxton, Gurney became committed to emancipation and other reforms early in his career. From 1837 to 1840 he traveled extensively in the United States, Canada, and the West Indies. While in the United States, Gurney had numerous conversations on the subject of slavery with leading political figures, including John C. Calhoun, Martin Van Buren, and Virginia governor David Campbell. In 1838 he preached in the House of Representatives and the following year wrote a pamphlet, Free and Friendly Remarks. . . on the Subject ofthe Abolition ofNorth American Slavery (New York, 1839), criticizing a proslavery speech made by Henry Clay. Gurney spent four months in the British West Indies in 1839, preaching and collecting information on the state of free labor. He published his observations, which included an indictment of American slavery, in A Winter in the West Indies. . . (London, 1840). Washington (DC) National Era, 25 March 1847; David E. Swift, Joseph John Gurney: Banker, Reformer, and Quaker (Middletown, Conn. , 1962); Thomas E. Drake, Quakers and Slavery in America (New Haven, 1950), 163, 173; William Robinson, ed., Friends of a Half Century: Fifty Memorials. . . 1840-1890 (London, 1891), 173-79; DNB, 8: 806-07. whom to name here ought to secure a round of applause. (Loud
applause.) He went, contrary to the advice of another—I was going to say,
a nobler hero, but I can scarcely recognize a nobler one than Gurney.
Robert Purvis was the man: he advised him not to go, and for a time he was
inclined to listen to his counsel. He told him it would be of no use for him to
go, for that as sure as he went he would only be himself enslaved, and could
of course do nothing towards freeing his wife. Under the influence of his
counsel he consented not to go; but when he left the house of Purvis, the
thoughts of his wife in Slavery came back to his mind to trouble his peace
and disturb his slumbers. So he resolved again to take no counsel either on
the one hand or the other, but to go back to Virginia and rescue his wife if
possible. That was a noble resolve (applause) and the result was still more
noble. On reaching there he was unfortunately arrested and thrown into
prison and put under heavy irons. At the appointed time he was brought
manacled upon the auctioneer’s block, and sold to a New Orleans trader.
We see nothing more of Madison Washington, until we see him at the
head of a gang of one hundred slaves destined for the Southern market. He,
together with the rest of the gang, were driven on board the brig Creole, at
Richmond, and placed beneath the hatchway, in irons; the slave-dealer—I
sometimes think I see him—walking the deck of that ship freighted with
human misery, quietly smoking his segar, calmly and coolly calculating
the value of human flesh beneath the hatchway. The first day passed
away—the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh passed, and there
was nothing on board to disturb the repose of this iron-hearted monster. He
was quietly hoping for a pleasant breeze to waft him to the New Orleans
market before it should be glutted with human flesh. On the 8th day it
seems that Madison Washington succeeded in getting off one of his irons,
for he had been at work all the while. The same day he succeeded in getting
the irons off the hands of some seventeen or eighteen others. When the
slaveholders came down below they found their human chattels apparently
all with their irons on, but they were broken. About twilight on the ninth
day, Madison, it seems, reached his head above the hatchway, looked out
on the swelling billows of the Atlantic, and feeling the breeze that coursed
over its surface, was inspired with the spirit of freedom. He leapt from
beneath the hatchway, gave a cry like an eagle to his comrades beneath,
saying, we must go through. (Great applause.) Suiting the action to the
word, in an instant his guilty master was prostrate on the deck, and in a very
few minutes Madison Washington, a black man, with woolly head, high
cheek bones, protruding lip, distended nostril, and retreating forehead, had
the mastery of that ship, and under his direction, that brig was brought
safely into the port of Nassau, New Providence. (Applause)
There are more Madison Washingtons in the South, and the time may
not be distant when the whole South will present again a scene something
similar to the deck of the Creole.
But what was the result? The moment they found themselves in the
waters of England, under British rule, the slave-sellers went to the Ameri-
can consul for the purpose of obtaining assistance to keep the slaves on
board.11The chief mate of the Creole, Zephaniah Gifford, was allowed to contact the American consul, John Bacon, and report on the events that had transpired. Jones, “Case of the Creole Slave Revolt," 31. But they had applied to the wrong source—they were in the wrong
pew. (Laughter.) The Government sent them assistance, but in that most
questionable shape that they knew not whether their intents were charitable
or wicked. The assistance came in the shape of a platoon of black sol-
diers.12Twenty-four black soldiers, by order of the colonial governor Francis Cockburn, went aboard the Creole on 9 November 1841. Jones, “Case of the Creole Slave Revolt," 31. (Laughter.) Down they came, and it seems that they came not so
much after all to protect the passengers (for it was supposed that they could
protect themselves) as to protect the vessel. And they speedily communi-
cated the idea that these coloured passengers were at liberty to go where
they pleased. They had reached the British soil, of which Curran has so
eloquently spoken, and which I will here repeat.
“I speak in the spirit of British law, which makes liberty commensu-
rate with, and inseparable from British soil; which proclaims liberty even to
the stranger and sojourner. The moment he sets his foot on British earth, the
ground on which he treads is holy. No matter in what language his doom
may have been pronounced; no matter in what disastrous battle his liberty
may have been cloven down; no matter what obligation incompatible with
freedom may have borne upon him; no matter with what solemnity he has
been devoted on the altar of Slavery; the moment he stands on British earth
the altar and the god tumble to the dust; his spirit walks forth in its majesty,
his body swells beyond the measure of his chains that burst from round
him, and he stands redeemed, regenerated, disenthralled by the irresistible
genius of universal emancipation."13Douglass paraphrases from a speech made by Curran in 1794. Thomas Davis, ed, The Speeches of the Right Honorable John Philpot Curran (Dublin, 1845), 182. (Applause)
That eloquent outburst of Curran was perfectly true as applied to the
case of these slaves. They went ashore and walked about their business. Of
course the transaction created some sensation in this free, democratic
republic. The news came across the Atlantic with electrical effect, and fell
into the midst of our Congress like a bombshell. The greatest amount of
consternation and alarm abounded there. Henry Clay rose in his place with
tears in his eyes (laughter) and said it was time that the American people in
all sections of the country should lay aside all sectional difficulties, and
present an unbroken front to the English.14Clay made his remarks on 11 January 1842. Congressional Globe, 27th Cong., 2nd sess., 116.(Laughter) Mr. Calhoun said
that American ships were American territories (great laughter): they consti-
tuted a part of the national domain, and that wherever the American star-
spangled banner waved, of course the right of slaveholders to hold their
property was to be sacredly guarded. England had violated her treaties and
stipulations. England had violated the comity of nations.15John C. Calhoun commented on the Creole case on 22 December 1841 and on 11 January and 3 February 1842. Congressional Globe, 27th Cong, 2nd sess., 47, 115, 203-04. Mr. Rives
thought that this event presented a crisis in the history of our diplomacy
with England.16William Cabell Rives (1793-1868), Virginia lawyer, politician, and planter, graduated from William and Mary College in 1809, and in 1814, after a two-year apprenticeship with Thomas Jefferson, was admitted to the Charlottesville bar. Active in Virginia politics, he was a delegate to the 1816 state constitutional convention and a member of the House of Delegates (1817-23). For three successive terms he was elected as a Democrat (1823-29) to the U.S. House of Representatives. From 1829 to 1832 he served as minister to France, a post he was to fill again from 1849 to 1853. Rives represented his state in the U.S. Senate as a Democrat (1832-34, 1836-39) and later as a Whig (1841-45). While serving the latter term, Rives, during a debate on the Creole incident on 22 December 1841 , contended that “a continuance of peace" between Great Britain and the United States was “imminently precarious. " Though he was initially opposed to secession, he participated in both the Confederate provisional and first regular congresses. Russell S. Wingfield, “William Cabell Rives," Richmond College Historical Papers, 1: 57-72 (June 1915); Congressional Globe, 27th Cong., 2nd sess., 47; Lib., 31 December 1841; Richmond Whig and Advertiser, 1 May 1868; Alexander Brown, The Cabells and Their Kin: A Memorial Volume of History, Biography, and Genealogy (Boston, 1895), 407-11; Jon L. Wakelyn, Biographical Dictionary of the Confederacy (Westport, Conn., 1977), 369; Biographical Directory of the American Congress, 1774-1961 (Washington, DC, 1961), 1524; ACAB, 5: 267; NCAB, 6: 486-87; DAB, 15: 635-37. Mr. Preston thought that immediate energetic measures
should be adopted for the reclamation of these slaves to bring them back to
the United States.17William Campbell Preston so argued during a debate in the Senate on 11 January 1842. Congressional Globe, 27th Cong., 2nd sess., 116. Daniel Webster, the God-like, the man of “October
Sun” memory, was then Secretary of State, under the long nose of—l had
almost forgotten the name—John Tyler; or rather Captain Tyler, that’s the
name. (Laughter) And what did Webster do? Why the first thing he did
was to write a letter to Edward Everett, who was then our Minister at the
Court of St. James, directing him at once to commence negotiations for the
return of those men who had gained their freedom; at any rate for the return
of Madison Washington and the brave eighteen who had so nobly achieved
their freedom on the deck of the Creole, and demanding payment for the
remainder. It resulted much as you might have expected. The British Gov-
ernment treated it with the utmost deference—for they are a very deferen-
tial people. They talked about honourable and right honourable, lords,
dukes, and going through all their Parliamentary titles, and sent Lord
Ashburton18Alexander Baring, Lord Ashburton. over to this country to tell us of course, that that very deferen-
tial people could not send back the “niggers.” (Laughter and applause.)
So Uncle Sam could not get them and he has not got them yet. (Renewed
applause.)
Sir, I thank God that there is some part of his footstool upon which the
bloody statutes of Slavery cannot be written. They cannot be written on the
proud, towering billows of the Atlantic. The restless waves will not permit
those bloody statutes to be recorded there; those foaming billows forbid it;
old ocean gnawing with its hungry surges upon our rockbound coast
preaches a lesson to American soil: “You may bind chains upon the limbs
of your people if you will; you may place the yoke upon them if you will;
you may brand them with irons, you may write out your statutes and
preserve them in the archives of your nation if you will; but the moment
they mount the surface of our unsteady waves, those statutes are obliter-
ated, and the slave stands redeemed, disenthralled.” This part of God’s
domain then is free, and I hope that ere long our own soil will be also free.
(Applause.)