The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered: an Address Delivered in Hudson, Ohio, on July 12, 1854
THE CLAIMS OF THE NEGRO ETHNOLOGICALLY
CONSIDERED: AN ADDRESS DELIVERED IN HUDSON, OHIO,
ON 12 JULY 1854
The Claims of The Negro Ethnologically Considered: An Address, Before the Literary
Societies of Western Reserve College, at Commencement, July 12, 1854 (Rochester, NY. ,
1854). Other texts in Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 21 July 1854; Rochester Daily American,
27 July 1854; Liberator, 28 July 1854; New York Daily Tribune, 31 July 1854; Anti-
Slavery Bugle, 5 August 1854; Glasgow Christian News, 9 September 1854; Speech File,
reel 14, frames 106—26, reel 19, frames 324—51, FD Papers, DLC; Gregory, Frederick
Douglass, 106-15; Foner, Life and Writings, 2: 289-309.
When it was announced that Douglass would address the prestigious Philoze-
tian and Phi Delta literary societies of Western Reserve College in Hudson,
Ohio, during commencement week in 1854, the news was greeted with in-
credulity, praise, and disapproval. Never before had a black person been the
keynote speaker at the graduation exercises of a major American university.
Western Reserve was one of the first colleges established in the West and had
an antislavery tradition dating back to the early 1830s. Its management,
however, was in the hands of colonizationists and orthodox Calvinists who,
according to the New York Tribune of 31 July 1854, “inclined to conser-
vatism in most respects.” The faculty, trustees, and president of the college
criticized the invitation in public and in private and tried to get the graduating
class to withdraw it. Unsure about what to say on such an occasion, Douglass
agreed to speak only after Dr. M. B. Anderson, the president of the University
of Rochester and “a distinguished ethnologist,” and Dr. Henry Wayland, a
member of the Rochester faculty, advised him to do so, later providing him
with information and books. Douglass labored “many days and nights" on
the speech. “Written orations had not been in my line,” and this first effort.
he later felt, “was a very defective production.” Yet the nearly three thousand
persons who filled the spacious tent on the campus at 1:00 P.M. on 12 July
1854 did not think so, even though some of them had come hoping to see the
quondam slave fall on his face. “Douglass commanded the most fixed atten-
tion for two hours, on a hot summer afternoon,” reported the Hudson (Ohio)
Observer. His eloquence brought “many glistening tears” to the eyes of the
audience, said the Chronicle and Transcript. Douglass wrote later that his
remarks “were enthusiastically received” only when he departed from his
text and spoke extemporaneously. But his memory had played tricks on him.
Every newspaper that reported the speech or took notice of the printed version
was impressed with the depth of Douglass’s research and the cogency of his
thought. The Worcester (Mass) Spy expressed a general viewpoint: “He
showed that he was familiar with the general and natural history of man. His
language was chaste, and his reasoning strong, able and logical." The occa-
sion proved to be an overwhelming success for Douglass and somewhat of an
embarrassment to the college administration, which was under fire for poor
financial management. To some critics of the administration it seemed a vote
of no confidence that for the first time in the college's history more people
attended the literary society’s function than the graduation ceremony proper.
Douglass stayed for the latter ceremony on the following day, speaking briefly
in the morning and attending the oratorical and musical performances in the
afternoon and evening. FDP, 14, 28 July, 4, 11 August 1854; New York
American Jubilee, August 1854; Lib., 18 August 1854; New York Indepen-
dent, 27 July 1854: “Justice” to the Editor, “Truth” to the Editor, in New
York Independent, 17 August, 7 September 1854; Audrey McCluskey and
John McCluskey, “Frederick Douglass on Ethnology: A Commencement
Address at Western Reserve College, 1854,” NHB, 40: 747-49 (September-
October 1977); Douglass, Life and Times, 413—14;Carroll Cutler, A History
of Western Reserve College, 1826-1876 (Cleveland, 1876), 24-53; [Henry
B. Loomis], One Hundred Years of Western Reserve (Hudson, Ohio, 1926),
24-26; Frederick C. Waite, Western Reserve University: The Hudson Era
(Cleveland, 1943), 228-36; Lora Case, Hudson of Long Ago: Reminiscences
(Hudson, Ohio, 1963), 29-30.
Gentlemen of the Philozetian Society: I propose to submit to you a few
thoughts on the subject of the Claims of the Negro, suggested by ethnologi-
cal science, or the natural history of man. But before entering upon that
subject, I trust you will allow me to make a remark or two, somewhat
personal to myself. The relation between me and this occasion may justify
what, in others, might seem an offence against good taste.
This occasion is to me one of no ordinary interest, for many reasons;
and the honor you have done me, in selecting me as your speaker, is as
grateful to my heart, as it is novel in the history of American Collegiate or
Literary Institutions. Surprised as I am, the public are no less surprised, at
the spirit of independence, and the moral courage displayed by the gentle-
men at whose call I am here. There is felt to be a principle in the matter,
placing it far above egotism or personal vanity; a principle which gives to
this occasion a general, and I had almost said, an universal interest. I
engage to-day, for the first time, in the exercises of any College Com-
mencement. It is a new chapter in my humble experience. The usual
course, at such times, I believe, is to call to the platform men of age and
distinction, eminent for eloquence, mental ability, and scholarly attain-
ments—men whose high culture, severe training, great experience, large
observation, and peculiar aptitude for teaching qualify them to instruct
even the already well instructed, and to impart a glow, a lustre, to the
acquirements of those who are passing from the Halls of learning, to the
broad theatre of active life. To no such high endeavor as this is your humble
speaker fitted; and it was with much distrust and hesitation that he accepted
the invitation, so kindly and perseveringly given, to occupy a portion of
your attention here to-day.
I express the hope, then, gentlemen, that this acknowledgment of the
novelty of my position, and my unaffected and honest confession of inap-
titude, will awaken a sentiment of generous indulgence towards the scat-
tered thoughts I have been able to fling together, with a view to presenting
them as my humble contribution to these Commencement Exercises.
Interesting to me, personally, as this occasion is, it is still more in-
teresting to you; especially to such of you as have completed your educa-
tion, and who (not wholly unlike the gallant ship, newly launched, full
rigged, and amply fitted, about to quit the placid waters of the harbor for the
boisterous waves of the sea) are entering upon the active duties and mea-
sureless responsibilities incident to the great voyage of life. Before such,
the ocean of mind lies outspread more solemn than the sea, studded with
difficulties and perils. Thoughts, theories, ideas, and systems, so various,
and so opposite, and leading to such diverse results, suggest the wisdom of
the utmost precaution, and the most careful survey, at the start. A false
light, a defective chart, an imperfect compass, may cause one to drift in
endless bewilderment, or to be landed at last amid sharp, destructive rocks.
On the other hand, guided by wisdom, manned with truth, fidelity and
industry, the haven of peace, devoutly wished for by all, may be reached in
safety by all. The compensation of the preacher is full, when assured that
his words have saved even one from error and from ruin. My joy shall be
full, if, on this occasion, I shall be able to give a right direction to any one
mind, touching the question now to be considered.
Gentlemen, in selecting the Claims of the Negro as the subject of my
remarks to-day, I am animated by a desire to bring before you a matter of
living importance—[a] matter upon which action, as well as thought, is
required. The relation subsisting between the white and black people of this
country is the vital question of the age. In the solution of this question, the
scholars of America will have to take an important and controlling part.
This is the moral battle field to which their country and their God now call
them. In the eye[s] of both, the neutral scholar is an ignoble man. Here, a
man must be hot, or be accounted cold, or, perchance, something worse
than hot or cold. The lukewarm and the cowardly, will be rejected by
earnest men on either side of the controversy. The cunning man who avoids
it, to gain the favor of both parties, will be rewarded with scorn; and the
timid man who shrinks from it, for fear of offending either party, will be
despised. To the lawyer, the preacher, the politician, and to the man of
letters, there is no neutral ground. He that is not for us, is against us.
Gentlemen, I assume at the start, that wherever else I may be required to
speak with bated breath, here, at least, I may speak with freedom the
thought nearest my heart. This liberty is implied, by the call I have received
to be here; and yet I hope to present the subject so that no man can
reasonably say, that an outrage has been committed, or that I have abused
the privilege with which you have honored me. I shall aim to discuss the
claims of the negro, general and special, in a manner, though not scientific,
still sufficiently clear and definite to enable my hearers to form an in-
telligent judgment respecting them.
The first general claim which may here be set up, respects the manhood
of the negro. This is an elementary claim, simple enough, but not without
question. It is fiercely opposed. A respectable public journal, published in
Richmond, Va., bases its whole defence of the slave system upon a denial
of the negro’s manhood.
“The white peasant is free, and if he is a man of will and intellect, can
rise in the scale of society; or at least his offspring may. He is not deprived
by law of those ‘inalienable rights,’ ‘liberty and the pursuit of happiness,’
by the use of it. But here is the essence of slavery—that we do declare the
negro destitute of these powers. We bind him by law to the condition of the
laboring peasant for ever, without his consent, and we bind his posterity
after him. Now, the true question is, have we a right to do this? If we have
not, all discussions about his comfortable situation and the actual condition
of free laborers elsewhere, are quite beside the point. If the negro has the
same right to his liberty and the pursuit of his own happiness that the white
man has, then we commit the greatest wrong and robbery to hold him a
slave—an act at which the sentiment of justice must revolt in every
heart—and negro slavery is an institution which that sentiment must sooner
or later blot from the face of the earth.”—Richmond Examiner.
After stating the question thus, the Examiner boldly asserts that the
negro has no such right——BECAUSE HE IS NOT A MAN!
There are three ways to answer this denial. One is by ridicule; a second
is by denunciation; and a third is by argument. I hardly know under which
of these modes my answer to-day will fall. I feel myself somewhat on trial;
and that this is just the point where there is hesitation, if not serious doubt. I
cannot, however, argue; I must assert. To know whether [a] negro is a man,
it must first be known what constitutes a man. Here, as well as elsewhere, I
take it, that the “coat must be cut according to the cloth. ” It is not neces-
sary, in order to establish the manhood of any one making the claim, to
prove that such an one equals Clay1Henry Clay. in eloquence, or Webster2Daniel Webster. and Calhoun3John C. Calhoun.
in logical force and directness; for, tried by such standards of mental
power as these, it is apprehended that very few could claim the high
designation of man. Yet something like this folly is seen in the arguments
directed against the humanity of the negro. His faculties and powers,
uneducated and unimproved, have been contrasted with those of the high-
est cultivation; and the world has then been called upon to behold the
immense and amazing difference between the man admitted, and the man
disputed. The fact that these intellects, so powerful and so controlling, are
almost, if not quite, as exceptional to the general rule of humanity in one
direction, as the specimen negroes are in the other, is quite overlooked.
Man is distinguished from all other animals, by the possession of
certain definite faculties and powers, as well as by physical organization
and proportions. He is the only two-handed animal on the earth—the only
one that laughs, and nearly the only one that weeps. Men instinctively
distinguish between men and brutes. Common sense itself is scarcely
needed to detect the absence of manhood in a monkey, or to recognize its
presence in a negro. His speech, his reason, his power to acquire and to
retain knowledge, his heaven-erected face, his habitudes, his hopes, his
fears, his aspirations, his prophecies, plant between him and the brute
creation, a distinction as eternal as it is palpable. Away, therefore, with all
the scientific moonshine that would connect men with monkeys; that would
have the world believe that humanity, instead of resting on its own charac-
teristic pedestal—gloriously independent—is a sort of sliding scale, mak-
ing one extreme brother to the ou-rang-ou-tang, and the other to angels, and
all the rest intermediates! Tried by all the usual, and all the unusual tests.
whether mental, moral, physical, or psychological, the negro is a MAN—
considering him as possessing knowledge, or needing knowledge, his ele-
vation or his degradation, his virtues, or his vices—whichever road you
take, you reach the same conclusion, the negro is a MAN. His good and his
bad, his innocence and his guilt, his joys and his sorrows, proclaim his
manhood in speech that all mankind practically and readily understand[s].
A very recondite author says that “man is distinguished from all other
animals, in that he resists as well as adapts himself to his circumstances."4Douglass probably refers to the educator Samuel Stanhope Smith (1750-1819), whose ethnological views predominated among American naturalists until the emergence in the 18405 of the American School of Ethnology. In An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species (New Brunswick, N.J., 1810), Smith reasoned that humans, unlike animals, could exist in numerous environments because of their ability to adapt. William Stanton, The Leopard's Spots: Scientific Attitudes Toward Race in America, 1815-1859 (Chicago, 1960); DAB, 17: 244-45.
He does not take things as he finds them, but goes to work to improve them.
Tried by this test, too, the negro is a man. You may see him yoke the oxen,
harness the horse, and hold the plow. He can swim the river; but he prefers
to fling over it a bridge. The horse bears him on his back—admits his
mastery and dominion. The barn-yard fowl know his step, and flock around
to receive their morning meal from his sable hand. The dog dances when he
comes home, and whines piteously when he is absent. All these know that
the negro is a MAN. Now, presuming that what is evident to beast and to
bird, cannot need elaborate argument to be made plain to men, I assume,
with this brief statement, that the negro is a man.
The first claim conceded and settled, let us attend to the second, which
is beset with some difficulties, giving rise to many opinions, different from
my own, and which opinions I propose to combat.
There was a time when, if you established the point that a particular
being is a man, it was considered that such a being, of course, had a
common ancestry with the rest of mankind. But it is not so now. This is,
you know, an age of science, and science is favorable to division. It must
explore and analyze, until all doubt is set at rest. There is, therefore,
another proposition to be stated and maintained, separately, which, in other
days, (the days before the Notts, the Gliddens, the Agassiz[es], and
Mortons, made their profound discoveries in ethnological science),5The ethnological conclusions of Josiah Clark Nott (1804-73), George Robert Gliddon (1809-57), Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz (1807-73), and Samuel George Morton (1799-1851) collectively formed the basic doctrines of what came to be known as the American School of Ethnology. The American School questioned the theories of the eminent British physician and ethnologist James Cowles Prichard (1786-1848) and of the prominent American naturalist and educator Samuel Stanhope Smith. Prichard and Smith propounded the monogenist theory that there was a unified origin of the separate races and that the different races thus constituted one species. In contradistinction, the American School posited a polygenist theory, claiming that each race had a separate origin and was therefore a distinct species. Stanton, Leopard's Spots, 3-12; Fredrickson, Black Image, 74-76; ACAB, 1: 34-36, 2: 665, 4: 540; NCAB, 2: 360-62, 10: 265-66, 19: 84-85; DAB, 1: 114-22, 3: 582-83, 16: 344. might
have been included in the first.
It is somewhat remarkable, that, at a time when knowledge is so
generally diffused, when the geography of the world is so well
understood—when time and space, in the intercourse of nations, are almost
annihilated—when oceans have become bridges—the earth a magnificent
ball—the hollow sky a dome—under which a common humanity can meet
in friendly conclave—when nationalities are being swallowed up—and the
ends of the earth brought together—I say it is remarkable—nay, it is strange
that there should arise a phalanx of learned men—speaking in the name of
science—to forbid the magnificent reunion of mankind in one brotherhood,
A mortifying proof is here given, that the moral growth of a nation, or an
age, does not always keep pace with the increase of knowledge, and
suggests the necessity of means to increase human love with human learn-
ing.
The proposition to which I allude, and which I mean next to assert, is
this: that what are technically called the negro race, are a part of the human
family, and are descended from a common ancestry, with the rest of man-
kind. The discussion of this point opens a comprehensive field of inquiry. It
involves the question of the unity of the human race. Much has and can be
said on both sides of that question.
Looking out upon the surface ofthe Globe, with its varieties of climate,
soil, and formations, its elevations and depressions, its rivers, lakes,
oceans, islands, continents, and the vast and striking differences which
mark and diversify its multitudinous inhabitants, the question has been
raised, and pressed with increasing ardor and pertinacity, (especially in
modern times), can all these various tribes, nations, tongues, kindred, so
widely separated, and so strangely dissimilar, have descended from a
common ancestry? That is the question, and it has been answered variously
by men of learning. Different modes of reasoning have been adopted, but
the conclusions reached may be divided into two—the one YES, and the
other NO. Which of these answers is most in accordance with facts, with
reason, with the welfare of the world, and reflects most glory upon the
wisdom, power, and goodness of the Author of all existence, is the ques-
tion for consideration with us. On which side is the weight of the argument,
rather than which side is absolutely proved?
It must be admitted at the beginning, that, viewed apart from the au-
thority of the Bible, neither the unity, nor diversity of origin of the hu-
man family, can be demonstrated. To use the terse expression of the
Rev. Dr. Anderson,6Martin Brewer Anderson (1815-90) was born in Brunswick, Maine, graduated from Watervillc (now Colby) College in 1840, and remained there for another decade teaching rhetoric and modern history. From 1850 to 1853 he edited the New York Recorder, a weekly Baptist newspaper. Anderson served as president of the University of Rochester from its founding in 1853 to his retirement in 1889. In addition to his work as an educator, he published numerous articles on a variety of topics including ethnology, history, and religion. William C. Morey, Papers and Addresses of Martin B. Anderson, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1895); Cathcart, Baptist Encyclopaedia, 33-35; NCAB, 12: 243—44; DAB, 1: 269-70. who speaking on this point, says: “It is impossible to
get far enough back for that.” This much, however, can be done. The
evidence on both sides, can be accurately weighed, and the truth arrived at
with almost absolute certainty.
It would be interesting, did time permit, to give here, some of the most
striking features of the various theories, which have, of late, gained atten-
tion and respect in many quarters of our country—touching the origin of
mankind—but I must pass this by. The argument to-day, is to the unity, as
against that theory, which affirms the diversity of human origin.
THE BEARINGS OF THE QUESTION.
A moment’s reflection must impress all, that few questions have more
important and solemn bearings, than the one now under consideration. It is
connected with eternal as well as with terrestrial interests. It covers the
earth and reaches heaven. The unity of the human race—the brotherhood of
man—the reciprocal duties of all to each, and of each to all, are too plainly
taught in the Bible to admit of cavil. The credit of the Bible is at stake—and
if it be too much to say that it must stand or fall by the decision of this
question, it is proper to say, that the value of that sacred Book—as a record
of the early history of mankind—must be materially affected, by the deci-
sion of the question.
For myself can say, my reason (not less than my feeling, and my faith)
welcomes with joy, the declaration of the Inspired Apostle, “that God has
made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell upon all the face of the
earth.”7A paraphrase of Acts 17: 26. But this grand affirmation of the unity of the human race, and
many others like unto it, together with the whole account of the creation,
given in the early scriptures, must all get a new interpretation or be over-
thrown altogether, if a diversity of human origin can be maintained. Most
evidently, this aspect of the question makes it important to those who rely
upon the Bible, as the sheet anchor of their hopes—and the framework of
all religious truth. The young minister must look into this subject and settle
it for himself, before he ascends the pulpit, to preach redemption to a fallen
race.
The bearing of the question upon Revelation, is not more marked and
decided than its relation to the situation of things in our country, at this
moment. One seventh part of the population of this country is of negro
descent. The land is peopled by what may be called the most dissimilar
races on the globe. The black and the white—the negro and the
European—these constitute the American people—and, in all the likelihoods
of the case, they will ever remain the principal inhabitants of the
United States, in some form or other. The European population are greatlv
in the ascendant in numbers, wealth and power. They are the rulers of the
country—the masters—the Africans are the slaves—the proscribed portion
of the people—and precisely in proportion as the truth of human brother-
hood gets recognition, will be the freedom and elevation, in this country, of
persons of African descent. In truth, this question is at the bottom of the
whole controversy, now going on between the slaveholders on the one
hand, and the abolitionists on the other. It is the same old question which
has divided the selfish from the philanthropic part of mankind in all ages. It
is the question whether the rights, privileges, and immunities enjoyed by
some ought not to be shared and enjoyed by all.
It is not quite two hundred years ago, when such was the simplicity (I
will not now say the pride and depravity) of the Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of
the British West Indies, that the learned and pious Godwin, a missionary to
the West Indies, deemed it necessary to write a book, to remove what he
conceived to be the injurious belief that it was sinful in the sight of God to
baptize negroes and Indians.8Douglass refers to Godwyn, Negro's and Indian's Advocate. The West Indies have made progress since
that time. God’s emancipating angel has broken the fetters of slavery in
those islands, and the praises of the Almighty are now sung by the sable lips
of eight hundred thousand freemen, before deemed only fit for slaves, and
to whom even baptismal and burial tights [rites?] were denied.
The unassuming work of Godwin may have had some agency in pro-
ducing this glorious result. One other remark before entering upon the
argument. It may be said that views and opinions favoring the unity of the
human family, coming from one of lowly condition, are open to the suspi-
cion that “the wish is father to the thought,"9An allusion to Henry IV, Part II, act 4. sc. 5, line 91. and so, indeed, it may be.
But let it be also remembered, that this deduction from the weight of the
argument on the one side, is more than counterbalanced by the pride of race
and position arrayed on the other. Indeed, ninety-nine out of every hundred
of the advocates of a diverse origin of the human family in this country, are
among those who hold it to be the privilege of the Anglo-Saxon to enslave
and oppress the African—and slaveholders, not a few, like the Richmond
Examiner to which I have referred, have admitted, that the whole argument
in defence of slavery, becomes utterly worthless the moment the African is
proved to be equally a man with the Anglo-Saxon. The temptation, therefore,
to read the negro out of the human family is exceedingly strong, and
may account somewhat for the repeated attempts on the part of Southern
pretenders to science, to cast a doubt over the Scriptural account of the
origin of mankind. If the origin and motives of most works opposing the
doctrine of the unity of the human race could be ascertained, it may be
doubted whether one such work could boast an honest parentage. Pride and
selfishness, combined with mental power, never want for a theory to justify
them—and when men oppress their fellow-men, the oppressor ever finds,
in the character of the oppressed, a full justification for his oppression.
Ignorance and depravity, and the inability to rise from degradation to
civilization and respectability, are the most usual allegations against the
oppressed. The evils most fostered by slavery and oppression are precisely
those which slaveholders and oppressors would transfer from their system
to the inherent character of their victims. Thus the very crimes of slavery
become slavery ’s best defence. By making the enslaved a character fit only
for slavery, they excuse themselves for refusing to make the slave a
freeman. A wholesale method of accomplishing this result is to overthrow
the instinctive consciousness of the common brotherhood of man. For, let it
be once granted that the human race are of multitudinous origin, naturally
different in their moral, physical, and intellectual capacities, and at once
you make plausible a demand for classes, grades and conditions, for dif-
ferent methods of culture, different moral, political, and religious institu-
tions, and a chance is left for slavery, as a necessary institution. The
debates in Congress on the Nebraska Bill during the past winter, will show
how slaveholders have availed themselves of this doctrine in support of
slaveholding. There is no doubt that Messrs. Nott, Glidden, Morton, Smith
and Agassiz were duly consulted by our slavery propagating statesmen.
ETHNOLOGICAL UNFAIRNESS TOWARDS THE NEGRO.
The lawyers tell us that the credit of a witness is always in order.
Ignorance, malice or prejudice, may disqualify a witness, and why not an
author? Now, the disposition everywhere evident, among the class of
writers alluded to, to separate the negro race from every intelligent nation
and tribe in Africa, may fairly be regarded as one proof, that they have
staked out the ground beforehand, and that they have aimed to construct a
theory in support of a foregone conclusion. The desirableness of isolating
the negro race, and especially of separating them from the various peoples
of Northern Africa, is too plain to need a remark. Such isolation would
remove stupendous difficulties in the way of getting the negro in a favor-
able attitude for the blows of scientific Christendom.
Dr. Samuel George Morton may be referred to as a fair sample of
American Ethnologists. His very able work Crania Americana, published
in Philadelphia in 1839, is widely read in this country.10Douglass refers to Samuel G. Morton, Crania Americana; or, A Comparative View of the Skulls of Various Aboriginal Nations of North and South America (Philadelphia, 1839). Published by subscription, Crania Americana became the most famous of Morton's works. A compendium of essays and lithographs on the relationship between the crania and customs of the American Indians, the work argues that different races were created to adapt to their original environments and that external causes do not affect physical characteristics. Josiah G. Nott and George R. Gliddon, Types of Mankind; or Ethnological Researches. . . (Philadelphia, 1854), xxii—lvii; Stanton, Leopard's Spots, 30, 40. In this great work
his contempt for negroes is ever conspicuous. I take him as an illustration of
what had been alleged as true of his class.
The fact that Egypt was one of the earliest abodes of learning and
civilization, is as firmly established as are the everlasting hills, defying,
with a calm front the boasted mechanical and architectural skill of the
nineteenth century—smiling serenely on the assaults and the mutations of
time, there she stands in overshadowing grandeur, riveting the eye and the
mind of the modern world—upon her, in silent and dreamy wonder. Greece
and Rome—and through them Europe and America—have received their
civilization from the ancient Egyptians. This fact is not denied by anybody.
But Egypt is in Africa. Pity that it had not been in Europe, or in Asia, or
better still, in America! Another unhappy circumstance is, that the ancient
Egyptians were not white people; but were, undoubtedly, just about as dark
in complexion as many in this country who are considered genuine negroes;
and that is not all, their hair was far from being of that graceful lankness
which adorns the fair Anglo-Saxon head. But the next best thing, after
these defects, is a positive unlikeness to the negro. Accordingly, our
learned author enters into an elaborate argument to prove that the ancient
Egyptians were totally distinct from the negroes, and to deny all relation-
ship between. Speaking of the “Copts and Fellahs,” whom every body
knows are descendants of the Egyptians, he says, “The Copts, though now
remarkably distinct from the people that surround them, derive from their
remote ancestors some mixture of Greek, Arabian, and perhaps even negro
blood.” Now, mark the description given of the Egyptians in this same
work: “Complexion brown, The nose is straight, excepting the end, where
it is rounded and wide; the lips are rather thick, and the hair black and
curly.” This description would certainly seem to make it safe to suppose
the presence of “even negro blood.” A man, in our day, with brown
complexion, “nose rounded and wide, lips thick, hair black and curly,”
would, I think, have no difficulty in getting himself recognized as a negro!!
The same authority tells us that the “Copts are supposed by NEIBHUR,
DENON and others, to be the descendants of the ancient Egyptians;” and
Dr. Morton adds, that it has often been observed that a strong resemblance
may be traced between the Coptic visage and that presented in the ancient
mummies and statues. Again, he says, the “Copts can be, at most, but the
degenerate remains, both physically and intellectually, of that mighty
people who have claimed the admiration of all ages.” Speaking of the
Nubians, Dr. Morton says, (page 26)—
“The hair of the Nubian is thick and black—often curled, either by
nature or art, and sometimes partially frizzled, but never woolly.”
Again:—
“Although the Nubians occasionally present their national characters
unmixed, they generally show traces of their social intercourse with the
Arabs, and even with the negroes."11In the above paragraphs, Douglass quotes and closely paraphrases Morton, Crania Americana, 24-26.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The repetition of the adverb here “even,” is important, as showing the
spirit in which our great American Ethnologist pursues his work, and what
deductions may be justly made from the value of his researches on that
account. In everything touching the negro, Dr. Morton, in his Crania
Americana, betrays the same spirit. He thinks that the Sphinx was not
the representative of an Egyptian Deity, but was a shrine, worshiped at by
the degraded negroes of Egypt; and this fact he alleges as the secret of the
mistake made by Volney, in supposing that the Egyptians were real ne-
groes. The absurdity of this assertion will be very apparent, in view of the
fact that the great Sphinx in question was the chief of a series, full two miles
in length. Our author again repels the supposition that the Egyptians were
related to negroes, by saying there is no mention made of color by the
historian, in relating the marriage of Solomon with Pharaoh’s daughter;
and, with genuine American feeling, he says, such a circumstance as the
marrying of an European monarch with the daughter of a negro would not
have been passed over in silence in our day. This is a sample of the
reasoning of men who reason from prejudice rather than from facts. It
assumes that a black skin in the East excites the same prejudice which we
see here in the West. Having denied all relationship of the negro to the
ancient Egyptians, with characteristic American assumption, he says. “It
is easy to prove, that whatever may have been the hue of their skin, they
belong to the same race with ourselves."12In the preceding paragraph. Douglass quotes and closely paraphrases Morton, Crania Americana, 29, 31.
Of course, I do not find fault with Dr. Morton, or any other American,
for claiming affinity with Egyptians. All that goes in that direction belongs
to my side of the question, and is really right.
The leaning here indicated is natural enough, and may be explained by
the fact that an educated man in Ireland ceases to be an Irishman; and an
intelligent black man is always supposed to have derived his intelligence
from his connection with the white race. To be intelligent is to have one’s
negro blood ignored.
There is, however, a very important physiological fact, contradicting
this last assumption; and that fact is, that intellect is uniformly derived from
the maternal side. Mulattoes, in this country, may almost wholly boast of
Anglo-Saxon male ancestry.
It is the province of prejudice to blind; and scientific writers, not less
than others, write to please, as well as to instruct, and even unconsciously
to themselves, (sometimes), sacrifice what is true to what is popular.
Fashion is not confined to dress; but extends to philosophy as well—and it
is fashionable now, in our land, to exaggerate the differences between the
negro and the European. If, for instance, a phrenologist or naturalist under-
takes to represent in portraits, the differences between the two races—the
negro and the European—he will invariably present the highest type of the
European, and the lowest type of the negro.
The European face is drawn in harmony with the highest ideas of
beauty, dignity and intellect. Features regular and brow after the Webste-
rian mold. The negro, on the other hand, appears with features distorted.
lips exaggerated, forehead depressed—and the whole expression of the
countenance made to harmonize with the popular idea of negro imbecility
and degradation. I have seen many pictures of negroes and Europeans, in
phrenological and ethnological works; and all, or nearly all, excepting the
work of Dr. Prichard, and that other great work, Combs’ Constitution of
Man,13Douglass probably refers to James Cowles Prichard, Researches into the Physical History of Mankind, 5 vols. (1813; London, 1841) and George Combe, The Constitution of Man Considered in Relation to External Objects, 3d American ed. (Boston, 1834). have been more or less open to this objection. I think I have never
seen a single picture in an American work, designed to give an idea of the
mental endowments of the negro, which did any thing like justice to the
subject; nay, that was not infamously distorted. The heads of A. CRUM-
MEL,14Alexander Crummell. HENRY H. GARNET, SAM’L R. WARD,15Samuel Ringgold Ward. CHAS. LENOX REMOND,16Charles Lenox Remond.
W. J. WILSON,17Born and raised in Washington, D.C., William J. Wilson was a black schoolteacher in Brooklyn, New York. ,in the 1840s and 1850s. Wilson helped found the New York Society for the Promotion of Education Among Colored Children and the “Committee of Thirteen," an organization to assist fugitive slaves. He was a delegate to several National Negro Conventions and a supporter of the project to establish a black industrial college. In the 1850s Wilson became a frequent contributor to Frederick Douglass' Paper and the Anglo-African Magazine, writing under the pen name “Ethiop." During the Civil War he taught for the American Missionary Association in Washington, D.C., and worked for the Army Pay Department. In July 1865 he was appointed head cashier of the Washington branch of the Freedman's Savings Bank. Although Wilson attracted many depositors to the bank, he continually had difficulty balancing his books and was demoted to a traveling agent in 1873. During Reconstruction Wilson was a delegate to the Colored National Labor Union convention of 1869 and served as a proponent of a “Freedman's Homestead Company." He later served as a trustee of Howard University. FDP, 22 April, 27 December 1852, 11 March, 15 April, 10 June, 30 September 1853, 9 September 1854, 26 January, 25 May 1855; Washington (D.C.) New National Era, 11 May, 14, 28 December 1871; Anglo-African Magazine, 1: 52-55 (February 1859), 1: 87-90 (March 1859), 1: 100-03 (April 1859), 1: 173-77 (June 1859), 1: 216-19 (July 1859), 1: 243-47 (August 1859), 1: 321-24 (October 1859), 2: 41-45 (February 1860); Brown, The Rising Son, 443-45; Martin R. Delany, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (1852; New York, 1968). ,34; Freeman, “Free Negro in New York City," 46, 353; Carl R. Osthaus, Freemen, Philanthropy, and Fraud: A History of the Freedman's Savings Bank (Urbana, UL, 1976), 17, 25, 45, 104-05, 168-70, 181, 237; Pease and Pease, They Who Would Be Free, 80, 85, 108, 243, 295; Phillip Foner and Ronald L. Lewis, eds., The Black Worker: A Documentary History front Colonial Times to the Present (Philadelphia, 1978-), 2: 47-49, 130-32; Walter Dyson, Howard University: The Capstone of Negro Education (Washington, D.C., 1941), 418. J. W. PENNINGTON,18James William Charles Pennington (1809-71), known as Jim Pembroke in slavery, fled from bondage to become a leading antislavery writer, activist, and minister. Pennington was born on the Eastern Shore of Maryland where he became the slave of Frisbie Tilghman and was trained as a blacksmith. His flight north at the age of twenty-one led him to the home of a Pennsylvania Quaker who taught him to read and write. After residing in Chester County, Pennsylvania, with another Quaker family, Pennington found work in Long Island and attended night school and private tutorials. Five years later he began teaching black children in Newtown, Long Island, and then in New Haven, Connecticut, where he also studied theology. Pennington's ministerial career began in 1838 in Newtown and in 1840 he entered the Congregational ministry in Hartford, Connecticut, where he served until 1847, later serving as pastor (1848-55) of Shiloh Presbyterian Church in New York City. The only black member of the Hartford Central Association of Congregational Ministers, Pennington was twice elected its president. In 1843 Pennington traveled to England as a delegate-at-large to the World's Anti-Slavery Conference in London. He lectured in London, France, and Belgium and attended peace conferences in London, Brussels, and Paris, so impressing his audience at the latter occasion that the University of Heidelberg awarded him an honorary D.D. Fearing recapture after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, Pennington again traveled abroad, but only after he broke his many years of absolute silence and confessed his fugitive status to a Hartford friend, John Hooker. Through Hooker's negotiations, the abolitionists of Berwickshire bought Pennington‘s freedom in 1851 for $150. In 1854 Pennington purchased the freedom of his brother Stephen Pembroke, who, along with his two sons. had been arrested as fugitive slaves and returned to their Maryland owner. Although Pennington lost a suit that challenged segregation on New York‘s Sixth Avenue Railroad in 1855, his suit prompted the formation of the Legal Rights Association, an organization devoted to the desegregation of public transportation in New York. An active member ofthe American Missionary Association, the American Tract Society, the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, and the General Convention for the Improvement of Free People of Color, Pennington occasionally endorsed Henry Highland Garnet's African Civilization Society, until 1860, when he withdrew all support. In addition to many sermons, addresses, and regular contributions to the Anglo-African Magazine. Pennington wrote A Text Book of the Origins and History, etc, etc. of the Colored People (1841), a query, based on biblical references, into the Negro's ancestry and character, and an autobiography, The Fugitive Blacksmith (1849). Lib., 20 June 1851; New York Daily Times, 29 May 1855, 18, 20 December 1856; New York Daily Tribune, 26 May 1855; FDP, 8 June 1855; Aliened American, 9 April 1855; Christian Witness, 6: 461—67 (1849); BFASR, ser. I, 4: 99-100 (21 June 1843); Delany, Condition of the Colored People, 113; J. W. C. Pennington, The Fugitive Blacksmith, 3d ed. (London, 1850); Brown, Rising Son, 461-63; Caner G. Woodson, The Mind of the Negro as Reflected in Letters Written During the Crisis, 1800-1860 (1926; New York, 1969), 642-51; Freeman, “Free Negro in New York City," 49-51, 53, 88-89, 108-10, 418; NCAB, 14: 307; DAB, 14: 441-42. J. I. GAINES,19Black businessman John Isom Gaines (1821-59) of Cincinnati, Ohio, owned a riverfront store from which he supplied steamboats with provisions. Though he lacked a formal education. Gaines took an active interest in the education of black youth in his home town. After the Ohio legislature authorized the creation of free schools for black children in 1849, Gaines played a prominent role in the movement to force city authorities to turn over money to the newly formed black board of school trustees. His services as clerk of the black school board were later recalled when a local black school was named in his honor. A temperance advocate and a frequent contributor to Douglass's paper, Gaines opposed Delany's call for an emigration convention to meet in Cleveland in 1854. Reasoning that “mutual dependence is the balance wheel that holds society together." Gaines urged blacks not to emigrate but “to develop our moral and intellectual faculties, and by industry and economy, acquire capital to place ourselves in such a ‘primary and independent position' as to compel our enemies to respect us.” John I. Gaines to Douglass, 16 January 1854, in FDP, 27 January 1854; Lib., 27 April 1860; Cleveland Gazette, 23 October 1886; Dabney, Cincinnati's Colored Citizens, 43-44, 105-07. M. R. DELANY,20Born to a free mother and a slave father in Charlestown, in western Virginia, Martin Robison Delany (1812-85) was an editor, physician, and leading advocate of black emigration. In 1822 Delany's mother moved to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, where his father later joined them, and the young Delany attended a local school. In 1831 he moved to Pittsburgh where he worked as a barber, attended a school run by a black Methodist minister, and studied medicine, upgrading his occupation from “cupper and leecher“ to physician. Between 1843 and 1847, Delany was editor of the Mystery, a black Pittsburgh newspaper. For the next two years he served as co-editor of Doug1ass’s North Star and lectured and traveled extensively to gain new subscriptions for that paper. In 1850-51 Delany attended Harvard Medical College but, owing to protests from white students, was denied admission to the final term needed to complete his medical degree. The following year he wrote The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered (Philadelphia, 1852), in which he argued that emigration was the only remedy for the oppressed state of black Americans. When many black abolitionists, including Douglass, rejected Delany's position, he organized a series of National Emigration Conventions that met in 1854, 1856, and 1858. These assemblies created a permanent National Board of Commissioners, of which Delany was president and chief propagandist. In 1856 Delany moved to Chatham, Canada West, and three years later explored the Niger river valley in Africa looking for possible emigration sites. His novel Blake was serialized in the Weekly Anglo-African from November 1861 through May 1862. During the Civil War, Delany served the North first as a recruiter and examining surgeon and eventually as a major of the 104th U.S. Colored Troops. From 1865 to 1868 Delany was a Freedmen's Bureau officer in South Carolina and later was active in that state's politics, running unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor on the Independent Republican ticket in 1874. Ullman, Martin R. Delany, 52-103, 115-21, 140-71, 211-46; Dorothy Sterling, The Making of an Afro-American: Martin Robison Delany, 1812—1885 (Garden City, N.Y., 1971); Thomas Holt, Black Over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina during Reconstruction (Urbana, Ill., 1977), 74-75, 176-77; Miller,Search for a Black Nationality, 115-33, 171-83; Martin R. Delany, Blake; or, The Huts of America, ed. Floyd J. Miller (Boston, 1970), ix; DAB, 5: 219-20.
J. W. LOGUIN,21Jermain Wesley Loguen (c. 1810-72), son of a slave mother and his Tennessee owner, escaped to freedom in Canada in 1835. After working as a farm laborer and a hotel porter, he attended the Oneida Institute in Whitesboro, New York. Loguen taught school in several New York communities and then became a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. After passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, Loguen moved to the comparative safety of Syracuse where he was extremely active in the Underground Railroad. In 1851, when indicted for his part in the Jerry Rescue, Loguen briefly fled to Canada. He later supported Gerrit Smith's Radical Abolition party and aided John Brown to recruit men for the Harpers Ferry raid. After the Civil War Loguen was elected a bishop of his denomination and championed missionary work among the freedmen. New York Daily Tribune, 1 October 1872; San Francisco Elevator, 5 October 1872; Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 66-67, 154, 188; Benjamin Quarles, Allies for Freedom: Blacks and John Brown (New York, 1974), 39-44, 65-66, 73-75; DAB, 11: 368-69. J. M. WHITFIELD,22James Monroe Whitfield (1822-71), barber and poet, was born in New Hampshire. During the winter of 1838-39, the Young Men's Union Society of Cleveland appointed Whitfield to deliver an address on the subject of emigration. Thus, as a youth of sixteen, Whitfield urged that blacks establish separate settlements in the United States or on its borders. By the mid-1850s he had become a major spokesman for black emigration. After he moved to Buffalo, New York, in 1841, Whitfield worked as a barber and wrote poetry. Several of his poems had already been published in the North Star when Douglass visited Whitfield in Buffalo in late June 1850. Recounting their visit, Douglass lamented, “That talents so commanding, gifts so rare, poetic powers so distinguished, should be tied to the handle of a razor and buried in the precincts of a barber‘s shop, and that he who possesses them should be consigned, by the malignant arrangements of society, to occupy a position so menial, is painfully disheartening." A delegate to the black convention meeting in Rochester in 1853, Whitfield also endorsed and attended the 1854 emigration convention in Cleveland and was commissioned to investigate Central America as a site for prospective black settlements. Convinced that “full and fair equality can be looked for, only through the existence of national organizations of the different races," Whitfield hoped that the emigration of black Americans would contribute to the emergence of a powerful and independent black nation in the American hemisphere. Before leaving Buffalo around 1859, Whitfield published a volume of poetry, America and Other Poems (Buffalo, 1853), which he dedicated to Martin R. Delany. Later poems appeared in the Liberator, the San Francisco Pacific Appeal, and the San Francisco Elevator. After the Civil War, Whitfield's principal residence seems to have been in San Francisco, though he also lived in Portland, Oregon, and in Idaho. Between 1864 and 1869 he was Masonic Grand Master of California. Joan R. Sherman, “James Monroe Whitfield, Poet and Emigrationist: A Voice of Protest and Despair," JNH, 57: 169-76 (April 1972); Miller, Search for a Black Nationality, 137-40; Delany, Condition of the Colored People, 132; J. M. Whitfield to Editor, 15 November 1853, in FDP, 25 November 1853; ASB, 24 August 1850. J. C. HOLLY,23Joseph Cephas Holly (1825-55) and his younger brother, emigrationist spokesman and Episcopal bishop of Haiti James Theodore Holly, were born in Washington, D.C. The family dated its free status from 1772, when a Scots slaveowner named James Theodore Holly manumitted in Maryland the son who bore his name. Before their family moved to Brooklyn, New York, in 1844, the Holly brothers studied at a black school taught by a District of Columbia physician whose medical education had been partly financed by the American Colonization Society. In Brooklyn, Holly, like his father. worked as a shoemaker. Among the early subscribers to the North Star, he wrote five articles on American slavery for the paper between February and June 1848. Although he does not seem to have joined an antislavery organization, Holly addressed numerous antislavery appeals to northern blacks and whites and to southern nonslaveowners. In his attempt to build mass support for antislavery. he reasoned that “The poor white man will learn that his rights are wrapped up in the same bundle with the black man's, and that the rights of the one cannot be violated without affecting those of the other." After moving to Burlington, Vermont, in 1850, he often left the shoemaker's bench to speak on behalf of Douglass’s paper, to debate publicly the merits of Liberian emigration with his brother, and to organize relief for needy fugitive slaves. By 1853, Holly's opposition to colonization extended to black sponsored emigration measures as well. He objected to Martin Delany's call for a national emigration convention to meet in Cleveland in 1854, arguing that to emigrate was to desert the “great battle of human rights and human brotherhood now being waged in this country." Shortly after he moved to Rochester in 1853, he was appointed a delegate to the black national convention that assembled in Rochester later that year and published a volume of poetry, Freedom's Offering (Rochester, 1853). Joseph C. Holly to Henry [Clay], n.d., in NS, 1 February 1850; Joseph C. Holly to Douglass, 31 December 1851, in FDP, 22 January 1852; idem to Douglass, n.d., ibid., 5 February 1852; idem to Douglass, 23 March 1852, ibid., 1 April 1852; idem to Douglass, 5 April 1852, ibid., 15 April 1852; idem to Douglass, 13 June 1853, ibid., 17 June 1853; idem to Douglass, n.d., ibid., 28 October 1853; NS,4, 18 February, 10 March, 7 April, 9 June 1848, 6 Ju1y 1849; FDP, 2 February 1852, 22 July 1853, 4 January 1855; Miller, Search For a Black Nationality, 108-10; David M. Dean, Defender of the Race: James Theodore Holly, Black Nationalist Bishop (Boston, 1979), 3-20; Geraldine O. Matthews et al., comps, Black American Writers, 1773-1949: A Bibliography and Union List (Boston, 1975), 148. and hundreds of others
I could mention, are all better formed, and indicate the presence of intellect
more than any pictures I have seen in such works; and while it must be
admitted that there are negroes answering the description given by the
American ethnologists and others, of the negro race, I contend that there is
every description of head among them, ranging from the highest Indoo
Caucasian downward. If the very best type of the European is always
presented, I insist that justice, in all such works, demands that the very best
type of the negro should also be taken. The importance of this criticism may
not be apparent to all;—to the black man it is very apparent. He sees the
injustice, and writhes under its sting. But to return to Dr. Morton, or rather
to the question of the affinity of the negroes to the Egyptians.
It seems to me that a man might as well deny the affinity of the
Americans to the Englishman, as to deny such affinity between the negro
and the Egyptian. He might make out as many points of difference, in the
case of the one as in that of the other. Especially could this be done, if, like
ethnologists, in given cases, only typical specimens were resorted to. The
lean, slender American, pale and swarthy, if exposed to the sun, wears a
very different appearance to the full, round Englishman, of clear, blonde
complexion. One may trace the progress of this difference in the common
portraits of the American Presidents. Just study those faces, beginning with
WASHINGTON; and as you come thro’ the JEFFERSONS, the ADAMSES, and
the MADISONS, you will find an increasing bony and wiry appearance about
those portraits, & a greater remove from that serene amplitude which
characterises the countenances of the earlier Presidents. I may be mistaken,
but I think this is a correct index of the change going on in the nation at
large,—converting Englishmen, Germans, Irishmen, and Frenchmen into
Americans, and causing them to lose, in a common American character, all
traces of their former distinctive national peculiarities.
AUTHORITIES AS TO THE RESEMBLANCE OF THE EGYPTIANS
TO NEGROES.
Now, let us see what the best authorities say, as to the personal appear-
ance of the Egyptians. I think it will be at once admitted, that while they
differ very strongly from the negro, debased and enslaved, that difference
is not greater than may be observed in other quarters of the globe, among
people notoriously belonging to the same variety, the same original stock;
in a word, to the same family. If it shall be found that the people of Africa
have an African character, as general, as well defined, and as distinct, as
have the people of Europe, or the people of Asia, the exceptional dif-
ferences among them afford no ground for supposing a difference of race;
but, on the contrary, it will be inferred that the people of Africa constitute
one great branch of the human family, whose origin may be as properly
referred to the families of Noah, as can be any other branch of the human
family from whom they differ. Denon, in his Travels in Egypt, describes
the Egyptians, as of full, but “delicate and voluptuous forms, counte-
nances sedate and placid, round and soft features, with eyes long and
almond shaped, half shut and languishing, and turned up at the outer
angles, as if habitually fatigued by the light and heat of the sun; cheeks
round; thick lips, full and prominent; mouths large, but cheerful and smil-
ing; complexion dark, ruddy and coppery, and the whole aspect
displaying—as one of the most graphic delineators among modern travel-
ers has observed—the genuine African character, of which the negro is the
exaggerated and extreme representation.”24Douglass misquotes a passage from the travelogue of French engraver and administrator Dominique Vivant Denon (1747—1825), who actually described Egyptian female forms as “round and voluptuous, a small nose, the eyes long, half shut, and turned up at the outer angle, like those of all persons whose sight is habitually fatigued by the burning heat of the sun, or the dazzling white of snow; the cheeks round and rather thick, the lips pouting, the mouth large. but cheerful and smiling; in short, the African character, of which the negro is the exaggerated picture, though perhaps the original type." Dominique Vivant Denon, Travels in Upper and Lower Egypt, during the Campaign of General Bonaparte in That Country, trans. Arthur Aikin, 2 vols. (New York, 1803), 2: 44. Again, Prichard says, (page
152)—
“Herodotus traveled in Egypt, and was, therefore, well acquainted
with the people from personal observation. He does not say anything
directly, as to the descriptions of their persons, which were too well known
to the Greeks to need such an account, but his indirect testimony is very
strongly expressed. After mentioning a tradition, that the people of Colchis
were a colony from Egypt, Herodotus says, that ‘there was one fact
strongly in favor of this opinion—the Colchians were black in complexion
and woolly haired.’ ”
These are the words by which the complexion and hair of negroes are
described. In another passage, he says that
“The pigeon, said to have fled to Dodona, and to have founded the
Oracle, was declared to be black, and that the meaning of the story was
this: The Oracle was, in reality, founded by a female captive from the
Thebaid: she was black, being an Egyptian.” “Other Greek writers,” says
Prichard, “have expressed themselves in similar terms.”
Those who have mentioned the Egyptians as a swarthy people, accord-
ing to Prichard, might as well have applied the term black to them, since
they were doubtless of a chocolate color. The same author brings together
the testimony of Eschylus25Aeschylus (525-456 B.C.), Greek playwright. and others as to the color of the ancient Egyp-
tians, all corresponding, more or less, with the foregoing. Among the most
direct testimony educed by Prichard, is, first that of Volney, who, speaking
of the modern Copts, says:
“They have a puffed visage, swollen eyes, flat nose, and thick lips,
and bear much resemblance to mulattoes. ”
Baron Larrey says, in regard to the same people:
“They have projecting cheek bones, dilating nostrils, thick lips, and
hair and beard black and crisp. ”
Mr. Ledyard, (whose testimony, says our learned authority, is of the
more value, as he had no theory to support), says:
“I suspect the Copts to have been the origin of the negro race; the nose
and lips correspond with those of the negro; the hair, wherever I can see it
among the people here, is curled, not like that of the negroes, but like the
mulattoes."15The observations of Herodotus and the passages from Constantin de Volney, Baron Larrey, and John Ledyard that Douglass quotes and closely paraphrases appear in Prichard, Physical History of Mankind, 2: 228-29, 238-39.
Here I leave our learned authorities, as to the resemblance of the
Egyptians to negroes.
It is not in my power, in a discourse of this sort, to adduce more than a
very small part of the testimony in support of a near relationship between
the present enslaved and degraded negroes, and the ancient highly civilized
and wonderfully endowed Egyptians. Sufficient has already been adduced,
to show a marked similarity in regard to features, hair, color, and I doubt
not that the philologist can find equal similarity in the structures of their
languages. In view of the foregoing, while it may not be claimed that the
ancient Egyptians were negroes,—viz:—answering, in all respects, to the
nations and tribes ranged under the general appellation, negro; still, it may
safely be affirmed, that a strong affinity and a direct relationship may be
claimed by the negro race, to THAT GRANDEST OF ALL THE NATIONS OF
ANTIQUI'I’Y, THE BUILDERS OF THE PYRAMIDS.
But there are other evidences of this relationship, more decisive than
those alleged in a general similarity of personal appearance. Language is
held to be very important, by the best ethnologists, in tracing out the
remotest affinities of nations, tribes, classes and families. The color of the
skin has sometimes been less enduring than the speech of a people. I speak
by authority, and follow in the footsteps of some of the most learned writers
on the natural and ethnological history of man, when I affirm that one of the
most direct and conclusive proofs of the general affinity of Northern Afri-
can nations with those of West, East and South Africa, is found in the
general similarity of their language[s]. The philologist easily discovers,
and is able to point out something like the original source of the multiplied
tongues now in use in that yet mysterious quarter of the globe. Dr. R. G.
LATHAM, F. R. S., corresponding member of the Ethnological Society,
New York—in his admirable work, entitled “Man and his Migrations”—
says:
“In the languages of Abyssinia, the Gheez and Tigre, admitted, as
long as they have been known at all, to be Semitic, graduate through the
Amharic, the Talasha, the Harargi, the Gafat and other languages, which
may be well studied in Dr. Beke’s valuable comparative tables, into the
Agow tongue, unequivocally indigenous to Abyssinia, and through this
into the true negro classes. But, unequivocal as may be the Semitic ele-
ments of the Berber, Coptic and Galla, their affinities with the tongues of
Western and Southern Africa are more so. I weigh my words when I say,
not equally, but more; changing the expression, for every foot in advance
which can be made towards the Semitic tongues in one direction, the
African philologist can go a yard towards the negro ones in the other.”
In a note, just below this remarkable statement, Dr. Latham says:
“A short table of the Berber and Coptic, as compared with the other
African tongues, may be seen in the Classical Museum of the British
Association, for 1846. In the Transactions of the Philological Society is a
grammatical sketch of the Tumali language, by Dr. S. Tutsbek of Munich.
The Tumali is a truly negro language, of Kordufan; whilst, in respect to the
extent to which its inflections are formed, by internal changes of vowels
and accents, it is fully equal to the Semitic tongues of Palestine and
Arabia."27The quoted argument of British scholar and physician Robert Gordon Latham (1812-88) appears in Robert Gordon Latham, Man and His Migrations (New York, 1852), 156-57.
This testimony may not serve prejudice, but to me it seems quite
sufficient.
SUPERFICIAL OBJECTIONS.
Let us now glance again at the opposition. A volume, on the Natural
History of the Human Species, by Charles Hamilton Smith, quite false in
many of its facts, and as mischievous as false, has been published recently
in this country, and will, doubtless, be widely circulated, especially by
those to whom the thought of human brotherhood is abhorrent. This writer
says, after mentioning sundry facts touching the dense and spherical struc-
ture of the negro head:
“This very structure may influence the erect gait, which occasions the
practice common also to the Ethiopian, or mixed nations, of carrying
burdens and light weights, even to a tumbler full of water, upon the head."
No doubt this seemed a very sage remark to Mr. Smith, and quite
important in fixing a character to the negro skull, although different to that
of Europeans. But if the learned Mr. Smith had stood, previous to writing
it, at our door, (a few days in succession), he might have seen hundreds of
Germans and of Irish people, not bearing burdens of “light weight,” but of
heavy weight, upon the same vertical extremity. The carrying of burdens
upon the head is as old as Oriental Society; and the man writes himself a
blockhead, who attempts to find in the custom a proof of original dif-
ference. On page 227, the same writer says:
“The voice of the negroes is feeble and hoarse in the male sex.”
The explanation of this mistake in our author is found in the fact that an
oppressed people, in addressing their superiors—perhaps I ought to say.
their oppressors—usually assume a minor tone, as less likely to provoke
the charge of intrusiveness. But it is ridiculous to pronounce the voice of
the negro feeble; and the learned ethnologist must be hard pushed, to
establish differences, when he refers to this as one. Mr. Smith further
declares, that
“The typical woolly haired races have never discovered an alphabet,
framed a grammatical language, nor made the least step in science or
art."28Douglass quotes Charles Hamilton Smith, The Natural History of the Human Species: Its Typical Forms, Primeval Distribution, Filiations, and Migrations (1851; Boston, 1854), 226-29. The Flemish-bom Smith (1776-1859) authored—and sometimes illustrated—numerous treatises on both natural and military history. DNB, 18: 432-33.
Now, the man is still living, (or was but a few years since), among the
Mandingoes of the Western coast of Africa, who has framed an alphabet;
and while Mr. Smith may be pardoned for his ignorance of that fact, as an
ethnologist, he is inexcusable for not knowing that the Mpongwe language,
spoken on both sides of the Gaboon River, at Cape Lopez, Cape St.
Catharine, and in the interior, to the distance of two or three hundred miles,
is as truly a grammatically framed language as any extant. I am indebted,
for this fact, to Rev. Dr. M. B. ANDERSON, President of the Rochester
University; and by his leave, here is the Grammar—(holding up the
Grammar). Perhaps, of all the attempts ever made to disprove the unity of
the human family, and to brand the negro with natural inferiority, the most
compendious and barefaced is the book, entitled Types of Mankind, by
Nott and Glidden.29Douglass refers to Types of Mankind, coauthored by southern surgeon and ethnologist Josiah C. Nott and English-born archaeologist and Egyptologist George R. Gliddon. This work broadened the polygenist theories of the American School of Ethnology to include the theory that the Negro race was permanently inferior. First issued in April 1854, Types sold out immediately and went through nine more editions by the end of the century. Stanton, Leopard's Spots, 163; Fredrickson, Black Image, 74-75, 82, 187, 233. One would be well employed in a series of Lectures
directed to an exposure of the unsoundness, if not the wickedness of this
work.
THE AFRICAN RACE BUT ONE PEOPLE.
But I must hasten. Having shown that the people of Africa are, proba-
bly, one people; that each tribe bears an intimate relation to other tribes and
nations in that quarter of the globe, and that the Egyptians may have flung
off the different tribes seen there at different times, as implied by the
evident relations of their language, and by other similarities; it can hardly
be deemed unreasonable to suppose, that the African branch of the human
species—from the once highly civilized Egyptian to the barbarians on the
banks of the Niger—may claim brotherhood with the great family of Noah,
spreading over the more Northern and Eastern parts of the globe. I will now
proceed to consider those physical peculiarities of form, features, hair and
color, which are supposed by some men to mark the African, not only as an
inferior race, but as a distinct species, naturally and originally different
from the rest of mankind, and as really to place him nearer to the brute than
to man.
THE EFFECT OF CIRCUMSTANCES UPON THE PHYSICAL MAN.
I may remark, just here, that it is impossible, even were it desirable, in
a discourse like this, to attend to the anatomical and physiological argu-
ment connected with this part of the subject. I am not equal to that, and if I
were, the occasion does not require it. The form of the negro—(I use the
term negro, precisely in the sense that you use the term Anglo-Saxon; and I
believe, too, that the former will one day be as illustrious as the latter)—has
often been the subject of remark. His flat feet, long arms, high cheek bones
and retreating forehead are especially dwelt upon, to his disparagement,
and just as if there were no white people with precisely the same pecu-
liarities. I think it will ever be found, that the well or ill condition of any
part of mankind, will leave its mark on the physical as well as on the
intellectual part of man. A hundred instances might be cited, of whole
families who have degenerated, and others who have improved in personal
appearance, by a change of circumstances. A man is worked upon by what
he works on. He may carve out his circumstances, but his circumstances
will carve him out as well. I told a boot maker, in Newcastle-upon-Tyne,
that I had been a plantation slave. He said I must pardon him; but he could
not believe it; no plantation laborer ever had a high instep. He said he had
noticed that the coal heavers and work people in low condition had, for the
most part, flat feet, and that he could tell, by the shape of the feet, whether a
man’s parents were in high or low condition. The thing was worth a
thought, and I have thought of it, and have looked around me for facts.
There is some truth in it; though there are exceptions in individual cases.
The day I landed in Ireland, nine years ago, I addressed, (in company
with Father SPRATT30John Spratt. and that good man who has been recently made the
subject of bitter attack; I allude to the philanthropic JAMES HAUGHTON, of
Dublin), a large meeting of the common people of Ireland, on temperance.
Never did human faces tell a sadder tale. More than five thousand were
assembled; and I say, with no wish to wound the feelings of any Irishman,
that these people lacked only a black skin and wooly hair, to complete their
likeness to the plantation negro. The open, uneducated mouth—the long,
gaunt arm—the badly formed foot and ankle—the shuffling gait—the re-
treating forehead and vacant expression—and, their petty quarrels and
fights—all reminded me of the plantation, and my own cruelly abused
people. Yet, that is the land of GRATTAN, of CURRAN, of O’CONNELL, and
of SHERIDAN.31Henry Grattan, John Philpot Curran, Daniel O'Connell. Richard B. Sheridan. Now, while what I have said is true of the common people,
the fact is, there are no more really handsome people in the world, than
the educated Irish people. The Irishman educated, is a model gentleman; the
Irishman ignorant and degraded, compares in form and feature with the
negro!
I am stating facts. If you go into Southern Indiana, you will see what
climate and habit can do, even in one generation. The man may have come
from New England, but his hard features, sallow complexion, have left
little of New England on his brow. The right arm of the blacksmith is said to
be larger and stronger than his left. The ship carpenter is at forty round-
shouldered. The shoemaker carries the marks of his trade. One locality
becomes famous for one thing, another for another. Manchester and Low-
ell, in America, Manchester and Sheffield, in England, attest this. But
what does it all prove? Why, nothing positively, as to the main point; still,
it raises the inquiry—May not the condition of men explain their various
appearances? Need we go behind the vicissitudes of barbarism for an
explanation of the gaunt, wiry, ape like appearance of some of the genuine
negroes? Need we look higher than a vertical sun, or lower than the damp,
black soil of the Niger, the Gambia, the Senegal, with their heavy and
enervating miasma, rising ever from the rank growing and decaying vege-
tation, for an explanation of the negro’s color? If a cause, full and adequate,
can be found here, why seek further?
The eminent Dr. LATHAM, already quoted, says that nine-tenths of the
white population of the globe are found between 30 and 65 degrees North
latitude. Only about one-fifth of all the inhabitants of the globe are white;
and they are as far from the Adamic complexion as is the negro. The
remainder are—what? Ranging all the way from the brunette to jet black.
There are the red, the reddish copper color, the yellowish, the dark brown,
the chocolate color, and so on, to the jet black. On the mountains on the
North of Africa, where water freezes in winter at times, branches of the
same people who are black in the valley are white on the mountains. The
Nubian, with his beautiful curly hair, finds it becoming frizzled, crisped,
and even woolly, as he approaches the great Sahara. The Portuguese, white
in Europe, is brown in Asia. The Jews, who are to be found in all countries,
never intermarrying, are white in Europe, brown in Asia, and black in
Africa. Again, what does it all prove? Nothing, absolutely; nothing which
places the question beyond dispute; but it does justify the conjecture before
referred to, that outward circumstances may have something to do with
modifying the various phases of humanity; and that color itself is at the
control of the world’s climate and its various concomitants. It is the sun that
paints the peach—and may it not be, that he paints the man as well? My
reading, on this point, however, as well as my own observation, have
convinced me that from the beginning the Almighty, within certain limits,
endowed mankind with organizations capable of countless variations in
form, feature and color, without having it necessary to begin a new creation
for every new variety.
A powerful argument in favor of the oneness of the human family, is
afforded in the fact that nations, however dissimilar, may be united in one
social state, not only without detriment to each other, but, most clearly, to
the advancement of human welfare, happiness and perfection. While it is
clearly proved, on the other hand, that those nations freest from foreign
elements present the most evident marks of deterioration. Dr. JAMES
McCUNE SMITH, himself a colored man, a gentleman and scholar,
alleges—and not without excellent reason—that this, our own great nation,
so distinguished for industry and enterprise, is largely indebted to its com-
posite character.32Douglass may refer to the article “Civilization: Its Dependence on Physical Circumstances" by the prominent black physician, abolitionist, and writer, James McCune Smith (1813-65). In the article, which was later published in the first issue of the Anglo-African Magazine. Smith claimed that “civilization depends upon the frequent intercourse of men differing in physical and mental endowments." The son of a slave father and a self-emancipated bondswoman, Smith was born in New York City, where he attended the New York African Free School. Denied admission to Columbia, Geneva Medical College, and the New York Academy of Medicine, Smith set sail for Scotland in 1832. receiving his B.A. (1835), M.A. (1836). and M.D. (1837) from the University of Glasgow. Smith opened a pharmacy upon his return to New York City, set up a medical practice that catered to both blacks and whites, and devoted his efforts to abolitionist concerns. He briefly served as an associate editor of the Colored American in 1839 and contributed regularly to the Anglo-African Magazine and. under the pseudonym “Communipaw, “ to the North Star and Frederick Douglass' Paper. A longtime opponent of black colonization and emigration, Smith helped finance the revival of the Weekly Anglo-African as an anti-emigrationist organ in 1861. In 1863 Smith was appointed professor of anthropology at Wilberforce College but illness kept him from his post. He was a prominent member of the New York City Young Men's Association, the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, and the New York African Society for Mutual Relief. He was also the sole attending physician of the Society for the Promotion of Education Among Colored Children, a member and vestryman of St. Philip's Episcopal Church, and a trustee of the New York Society for the Promotion of Education Among Colored Children. FDP, 18 May 1855; Lib., 1 June 1838, 1 February 1839; James McCune Smith, “Civilization: Its Dependence on Physical Circumstances," Anglo-African Magazine, 1: 5-17 (January 1859); Freeman, “Free Negro in New York City," 40-42, 177, 186, 195, 200, 247, 276, 286, 325, 353, 394; Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 115, 134; Pease and Pease, They Who Would Be Free, 90-92, 103, 110; Miller, Search for a Black Nationality, 243; DAB, 27: 288-89. We all know, at any rate, that now, what constitutes the
very heart of the civilized world—(I allude to England)—has only risen
from barbarism to its present lofty eminence, through successive invasions
and alliances with her people. The Medes and Persians constituted one of
the mightiest empires that ever rocked the globe. The most terrible nation
which now threatens the peace of the world, to make its will the law of
Europe, is a grand piece of Mosaic work, in which almost every nation has
its characteristic feature, from the wild Tartar to the refined Pole.33Douglass alludes to Russia and the events leading to the Crimean War.
But, gentlemen, the time fails me, and I must bring these remarks to a
close. My argument has swelled beyond its appointed measure. What I
intended to make special, has become, in its progress, somewhat general. I
meant to speak here to-day, for the lonely and the despised ones, with whom
I was cradled, and with whom I have suffered; and now, gentlemen, in
conclusion, what if all this reasoning be unsound? What if the negro may
not be able to prove his relationship to Nubians, Abyssinians and Egyp-
tians? What if ingenious men are able to find plausible objections to all
arguments maintaining the oneness of the human race? What, after all, if
they are able to show very good reasons for believing the negro to have
been created precisely as we find him on the Gold Coast—along the
Senegal and the Niger—I say, what of all this? “A man’s a man for a’
that."34Douglass quotes a line from Robert Burns's song “For a‘ That and a' That." Smith, Works of Robert Burns, 227. I sincerely believe, that the weight of the argument is in favor of
the unity of origin of the human race, or species—that the arguments on the
other side are partial, superficial, utterly subversive of the happiness of
man, and insulting to the wisdom of God. Yet, what if we grant they are not
so? What, if we grant that the case, on our part, is not made out? Does it
follow, that the negro should be held in contempt? Does it follow, that to
enslave and imbrute him is either just or wise? I think not. Human rights
stand upon a common basis; and by all the reason that they are supported,
maintained and defended, for one variety of the human family, they are
supported, maintained and defended for all the human family; because all
mankind have the same wants, arising out of a common nature. A diverse
origin does not disprove a common nature, nor does it disprove a united
destiny. The essential characteristics of humanity are everywhere the
same. In the language of the eloquent CURRAN, “No matter what complex-
ion, whether an Indian or an African sun has burnt upon him," his title deed
to freedom, his claim to life and to liberty, to knowledge and to civilization,
to society and to Christianity, are just and perfect.35Thomas Davis, ed., The Speeches of the Right Honorable John Philpot Curran (Dublin, 1845), 182. It is registered in the
Courts of Heaven, and is enforced by the eloquence of the God of all the
earth.
I have said that the negro and white man are likely ever to remain the
principal inhabitants of this country. I repeat the statement now, to submit
the reasons that support it. The blacks can disappear from the face of
the country by three ways. They may be colonized,—they may be ex-
terminated,—or, they may die out. Colonization is out of the question;
for I know not what hardships the laws of the land can impose, which can
induce the colored citizen to leave his native soil. He was here in its
infancy; he is here in its age. Two hundred years have passed over him, his
tears and blood have been mixed with the soil, and his attachment to the
place of his birth is stronger than iron. It is not probable that he will be
exterminated; two considerations must prevent a crime so stupendous as
that—the influence of Christianity on the one hand, and the power of self
interest on the other; and, in regard to their dying out, the statistics of the
country afford no encouragement for such a conjecture. The history of the
negro race proves them to be wonderfully adapted to all countries, all
climates, and all conditions. Their tenacity of life, their powers of endur-
ance, their malleable toughness, would almost imply especial interposition
on their behalf. The ten thousand horrors of slavery, striking hard upon the
sensitive soul, have bruised, and battered, and stung, but have not killed.
The poor bondman lifts a smiling face above the surface of a sea of agonies,
hoping on, hoping ever. His tawny brother, the Indian, dies, under the
flashing glance of the Anglo-Saxon. Not so the negro; civilization cannot
kill him. He accepts it—becomes a part of it. In the Church, he is an Uncle
his history mark out for him a destiny, united to America and Americans.
Now, whether this population shall, by FREEDOM, INDUSTRY, VIRTUE and
INTELLIGENCE, be made a blessing to the country and the world, or whether
their multiplied wrongs shall kindle the vengeance of an offended God, will
depend upon the conduct of no class of men so much as upon the Scholars
of the country. The future public opinion of the land, whether anti-slavery
or pro-slavery, whether just or unjust, whether magnanimous or mean,
must redound to the honor of the Scholars of the country or cover them with
shame. There is but one safe road for nations or for individuals. The fate of
a wicked man and of a wicked nation is the same. The flaming sword of
offended justice falls as certainly upon the nation as upon the man. God has
no children whose rights may be safely trampled upon. The sparrow may
not fall to the ground without the notice of his eye, and men are more than
sparrows.
Now, gentlemen, I have done. The subject is before you. I shall not
undertake to make the application. I speak as unto wise men. I stand in the
presence of Scholars. We have met here to-day from vastly different points
in the world’s condition. I have reached here—if you will pardon the
egotism—by little short of a miracle: at any rate, by dint of some applica-
tion and perseverance. Born, as I was, in obscurity, a stranger to the halls of
learning, environed by ignorance, degradation, and their concomitants,
from birth to manhood, I do not feel at liberty to mark out, with any degree
of confidence, or dogmatism, what is the precise vocation of the Scholar.
Yet, this I can say, as a denizen of the world, and as a citizen of a country
rolling in the sin and shame of Slavery, the most flagrant and scandalous
that ever saw the sun, “Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are
honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever
things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report, if there be any
virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things."36Phil. 4: 8.