The Colonizationist Revival: An Address Delivered in Boston, Massachusetts, on May 31, 1849
THE COLONIZATIONIST REVIVAL: AN ADDRESS DELIVERED
IN BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS, ON 31 MAY 1849
Liberator, 8 June 1849. Other texts in National Anti-Slavery Standard, 7 June 1849; North
Star, 15 June 1849; Pennsylvania Freeman, 21 June 1849; Speech File, reel 13, frames
724-41, FD Papers, DLC; Carter G. Woodson, Negro Orators and Their Orations
(Washington, D.C., 1925), 178-91; Foner, Life and Writings, 1: 387-99, misdated 8 June
1849.
On the third and final day, the scene of the 1849 convention of the New
England Anti-Slavery Society shifted to Boston’s Faneuil Hall, where Edmund
Quincy presided and where Douglass gave an evening address criticizing
the American Colonization Society and its president, Henry Clay, before
an audience of as many as five thousand persons. Douglass had repeatedly
expounded on this theme during the three months since Clay’s public letter to
Richard Pindell had brought colonization back into the national spotlight by
outlining plans for the gradual emancipation and expatriation of Kentucky
slaves. On this occasion Douglass followed Garrison and Samuel May to the
platform. May spoke anecdotally, contrasting past denials of free speech to
abolitionists with the greater tolerance obtaining in 1849 and expressing his
happiness at the successful escape from slavery of Henry “Box” Brown, but
Garrison introduced three substantive resolutions. The first of these, praising
the memory of John Murray, the late Scottish abolitionist, asked that Douglass
give a further tribute. Garrison's other resolution began by quoting “Wilberforce,
Clarkson, Macaulay, Buxton and O’Connell" to the effect that “the
American Colonization Society is an obstruction to the progress of liberty.”
Garrison’s second resolution connected colonization plans like Clay’s with
race prejudice and charged that advocacy of expatriation on the account of the
skin color “which the Creator has stamped upon” slaves was “mean, base,
ludicrous and impious.” Douglass’s remarks supported Garrison’s resolutions
by attacking the particulars of Clay’s proposal and by providing concrete
examples of the racial assumptions underlying colonizationist ideas.
Although a section of the crowd showed its hostility by interrupting Douglass
with hisses, the Liberator noted “great applause” following his speech and
the Pennsylvania Freeman praised his “faithful and scathing” analysis of
Clay’s position. The editors of the Boston Republican commented that they
had “seldom heard a more effective speech in the old Cradle of Liberty.”
New York Evangelist, 7 June 1849; Boston Emancipator and Republican, 7
June 1849; ASB, 15 June 1849; PaF, 21 June 1849; Lib., 29 June 1849.
Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen—I never rise to speak in Faneuil
Hall, without a deep sense of my want of ability to do justice to the subject
upon which I undertake to speak. I can do a pretty good business, some
have said, in the country school houses in Western New York and else-
where; but when I come before the people of Boston in Faneuil Hall, I feel
my exceeding weakness. I am all the more embarrassed this evening,
because I have to speak to you in respect to a subject concerning which an
apology seems to be demanded. I allude to the subject of the American
Colonization Society—a subject which has had a large measure of anti-
slavery attention, and been long since disposed of at the hands of Wm.
Lloyd Garrison.*Douglass refers to Garrison's Thoughts on African Colonization (Boston, 1832). The only apology that I can make for calling attention to it
this evening is, that it has had a sort of “revival,” of late, through the
agency of a man whom I presume a large portion of this audience esteem
and admire. I allude to the Honorable Henry Clay of Kentucky.
(Applause) Though not a Yankee, you see I guessed correctly. I have
presumed rightly that you esteem and admire that gentleman. Now, if you
admire Mr. Clay, of course you would like to know all about him. You
would like, of course, to hear whatever can be said of him, and said fairly,
although a black man may presume to say it.
Mr. Clay has recently given to the world a letter, purporting to advo-
cate the emancipation of the slaves of Kentucky. That letter has been
extensively published in New England as well as [in] other parts of the
United States; and in almost every instance where a Whig paper has spoken
of the letter, it has done so in terms of high approval. The plan which Mr.
Clay proposes is one which seems to meet almost the universal assent of the
Whig party at the North; and many religious papers have copied the article,
and spoken in terms of high commendation of the humanity, of the clear-
sightedness and philanthropy of Henry Clay. Now, my friends, I am going
to speak to you in a manner that, unless you allow your reason and not your
prejudices to prevail, will provoke from you demonstrations of disapprobation.
I beg of you, then, to hear me calmly—without prejudice or opposition.
You, it must be remembered, have in your hands all power in this
land. I stand here not only in a minority, but identified with a class whom
every body can insult with impunity. Surely, the ambition for superiority
must be great indeed in honorable men to induce them to insult a poor black
man, whom the basest fellow in the street can insult with impunity. Keep
this in mind, and hear what I have to say with regard to Mr. Clay’s letter,
and his position as a slaveholder.
The letter of Mr. Clay commences in a manner that gives promise to the
reader that he shall find it a consistent, straight-forward anti-slavery document.
It commences by refuting, with one or two strokes of the pen, the
vast cart-loads of sophistry piled up by Mr. Calhoun and others, in favor of
perpetual slavery. He shows clearly, that Mr. Calhoun’s theory of slavery,
if admitted to be sound, would enslave the whites as readily as it enslaves
the blacks;—this would follow necessarily. Glancing at the question of the
natural inferiority of the colored man, [he says—“Admitting a question he
does not raise—admitting the whites of this country are superior to the
blacks,]2These lines, obliterated in Lib., 8 June 1849, are taken from NS, 15 June 1849. the fact devolves upon the former the duty of enlightening, instructing
and improving the condition of the latter.”3The quoted passages from Clay's letter actually read, “An argument in support of reducing the African race to slavery, is sometimes derived from their alleged intellectual inferiority to the white races; but, if this argument be founded on fact (as it may be, but which I shall not now examine), it would prove entirely too much. . . . If, indeed, we possess this intellectual superiority, profoundly grateful and thankful to HIM who has bestowed it, we ought to fulfil all the obligations and duties which it imposes; and these would require us not to subjugate or deal unjustly by our fellow-men who are less blessed than we are, but to instruct, to improve, and to enlighten them." Henry Clay to Richard Pindell, 17 February 1849, in African Repository and Colonial Journal, 25: 105-06 (April 1849). These are noble
sentiments, worthy of the heart and head of a great and good man. But how
does Mr. Clay propose to carry out this plan? He goes on to state that, in
carrying out his proposed plan of gradual emancipation, great care should
be taken that the rights and interests of the slaveholder should not be
jeoparded. He proceeds to state that the utmost caution and prudence
should guide the hand that strikes down slavery in Kentucky. With reference
to emancipation, he affirms that it should not commence until the year
1885. The plan is, that all children born of slave parents in Kentucky after
the year 1860, shall be free after arriving at the age of twenty-five. He sets
therefore the day of emancipation beyond the average length of the slave’s
life; for a generation of slaves in the far South dies out in seven years. But
how would he have these children of slave parents free? Not free to work
for themselves—not free to live on the soil that they have cultivated with
their own hard hands—that they have nourished with their best blood, and
toiled over and beautified and adorned—but that then they shall be let out
under an agent of the State, for three long years, to raise one hundred and
fifty dollars, with which to pay the price of their own expatriation from
their family and friends. (Voices—“Shame!”)
MR. DOUGLASS.—I hear the cry of shame—yes, it is a deep and damning
shame. He declares in that letter, that not only shall these emancipated
slaves work three years, but that he, Mr. Clay, will oppose any measure for
emancipation without the expatriation of the emancipated slaves. Just look
at the peculiar operation of this plan. Let us suppose that it is adopted, and
that in the year 1860 it commences. All children born of slave parents are to
be free in the year 1888. It is well known that all persons in the South have
contracted marriages long before this period, and have become parents,
some having children from one to four years of age. Henry Clay’s plan is,
that when these persons arrive at the age of twenty-eight, these parents shall
be torn away from their tender children, and hurried off to Liberia or
somewhere else; and that the children taken from these parents, before they
have become acquainted with the paternal relation, shall remain another
twenty-eight years; and when they have remained that period, and have
contracted matrimonial alliances, and become fathers and mothers, they
too shall be taken from their children, the slaveholders having kept them at
work for twenty-eight years, and hurried off to Liberia.
But a darker, baser feature than all these appears in this letter of Mr.
Clay. It is this:—He speaks of the loss which the slaveholder will be called
on to experience by the emancipation of his slaves. But he says that even
this trifling expenditure may be prevented by leaving the slaveholder the
right to sell—to mortgage—to transfer his slave property any time during
the twenty-five years. Only look at Henry Clay’s generosity to the
slaveholders of Kentucky. He has twenty-five long years during which to
watch the slave markets of New Orleans, of Memphis, of Vicksburg and
other Southern cities, and to watch the prices of cotton and rice and tobacco
on the other side of the Atlantic, and as the prices rise there in these articles,
he may expect a corresponding rise in the price of flesh in the slave market.
and then he can sell his slaves to the best advantage. Thus it is that the
glorious State of Kentucky shall be made free, and yet her purse be made
the heavier in consequence of it. This is not a proposition for emancipation,
but a proposition to Kentucky to sell off the slaves she holds in her possession,
and throw them off into the far Southern States—and then hypocritically
boast of being a free State, while almost every slave born upon her soil
remains a slave. And this is the plan of the good Henry Clay, whom you
esteem and admire so much. (Applause and hisses.) You that like to hiss, if
you had the chain on your own limbs, and were pent up in Henry Clay’s
own quarter, and had free access to Henry Clay’s own meal-tub, I think
would soon change your tune. (Laughter.)
I want to say a word about the Colonization Society, of which Henry
Clay is President. He is President of nothing else. (Laughter.) That Society
is an old enemy of the colored people in this country. Almost every respectable
man belongs to it, either by direct membership or by affinity. I
meet with colonizationists everywhere; I met with a number of them the
other day, on board the steamer Alida, going from Albany to New York. I
wish to state my experience on board of that steamer, and as it is becoming
a subject of newspaper remark, it may not be out of place to give my version
of the story:—On Thursday last, I took my passage on board the steamer
Alida, as I have stated, to go from Albany to New York. I happened to
have, very contrary to American taste and American prejudices and customs,
in my company, a couple of friends from England—persons who had
not been ashamed—nor had they cause to be ashamed from any feeling that
exists in that country against the colored man—of being found on equal
social terms with him in the city of London. They happen now to be
sojourning in this country; and as if unaware of the prejudice existing in this
country, or, if aware, perfectly regardless of it, they accompanied me on
the steamer, and shared, of course, my society, or permitted me to share
theirs on the passage to New York. About noon, I went into the cabin, and
inquired of one of the waiters if we could have dinner. The answer was, we
could. They had on a sign on each side of the captain's office, words to this
effect: “Meals can be received in the cabin at any hour during the day, by
application to the steward.” I made the application, and expected, of
course, that dinner would be forthcoming at the time appointed. The bell
rung—and though I do not know as it was altogether wise and prudent, I
took a lady on each arm—for my friends were white ladies, you must
know—and moved forward to the cabin. The fact of their being white
ladies will enable you more readily to understand the cause of the intensity
of hate displayed towards me. I went below, forgetting all about my complexion,
the curl of my hair, or the flatness of my nose, only remembering I
had two elbows and a stomach, and was exceedingly hungry. (Laughter.) I
walked below, as I have said, and took my seat at the table, supposing that
the table was the place where a man should eat.
I had been there but a very few moments, before I observed a large
number of American gentlemen rising up gradually—for we are gradualists
in this country—and moving off to another table, on the other
side. But feeling I was there on my own responsibility, and that those
gentlemen could not eat dinner for me, and I must do it for myself, I
preferred to sit still, unmoved by what was passing around me. I had been
there but a few moments, when a white man—after the order of American
white men—for I would say, for your consolation, that you are growing
darker and darker every year—the steward came up to me in a very curious
manner, and said, “Yer must get up from that table.” (Laughter) I demanded
by what authority he ordered me from the table. “Well,” said he,
“yer know the rule.” “Sir,” said I, “I know nothing of your rules. I know
that the rule is, that the passengers can receive their meals at any hour of the
day on applying to the steward.” Says he, “Now, it is no use for yer to talk,
yer must leave.” (Laughter.) “But where is the rule?” “Well,” said he,
“yer cannot get dinner on any boat on this river.” I told him I went up the
river in the Confidence, and took dinner, and no remark had been made.
“Well,” said he, “what yer can do on the Confidence, yer can’t do on the
Alida.” (Laughter) [“Are yer a going to get up?” “No, sir,” said I.
“Well,” says he, “I will have you up.”]4These lines, obliterated in Lib., 8 June 1849, are taken from NS, 15 June 1849. So off he goes to the upper deck,
and brings down the captain, mate, clerk, and two or three hands. I sat still
during the time of his absence; but finding they were mustering pretty
strong, and remembering I had but one coat, and not caring to have it torn,
and feeling I had borne a sufficient testimony against their unrighteous
treatment, I arose from the table, and walked to the other end of the cabin,
in company with my friends. A scene then occurred which I shall never
forget; not because of its impudence, but because of its malignity. A large
number of American ladies and gentlemen, seated around the table on the
other side of the cabin, the very moment we walked away, gave three
cheers for the captain, and applauded in the most uproarious manner the
steward, for having driven two ladies and one gentleman from the table,
and deprived them of dinner.
MR. GARRISON.—That is a fact for Europe.
MR. DOUGLAss.—They drove us from the table, and gave three cheers
for the captain for driving us away. I looked around on the audience there
assembled, to see if I could detect one line of generous magnanimity on
any face—any indignation manifested against the outrage that had been
perpetrated upon me and my friends. But not a look, not a word, not the
slightest expression of disapprobation in any part of the vessel. Now, I have
travelled in England, Ireland and Scotland—I mention this, not by way of
boast, but because I want to contrast the freedom of our glorious
country—and it is a glorious one, after all—with that of other countries
through which I have travelled—by railroads, in highways and byways,
steamboats, stage coaches, and every imaginable kind of vehicle—I have
stayed at some of the first hotels in London, Liverpool, Edinburgh, Glas-
gow, Dublin, and elsewhere—and I must say to you, good Americans, that
I never, in any of those cities or towns, received the first mark, or heard the
first word of disapprobation on account of the color of my skin. I may tell
you, that one of the ladies with me on the steamboat, though not a believer
in the right of women to speak in public, was so excited and so indignant at
the outrage perpetrated, that she went to the American captain, and told
him that she had heard much of the country, much of the gallantry of
American gentlemen—that they would be willing to rise from their seats to
allow a lady to be seated—and she was very happy in having the opportu-
nity of witnessing a manifestation of American gallantry and American
courtesy. I do think I saw one neck hang when this rebuke was adminis-
tered. (Applause.)
Most of the passengers were of the baser sort, very much like some
Western men—dark-complexioned, lean, lank, pinched up, about the ugliest
set of men I ever saw in my life. (Laughter.) I went to the steward
about two hours after they had cleared off the dinner table for those hungry,
wolfish-looking people. (Laughter.) My dear friends, if you had seen
them, you would have agreed with me. I then inquired of the steward if
now, after this hungry multitude had been fed, we could have a cup of
coffee and a biscuit. Said he—“Who are you? If you are the servant of
those ladies, you shall have what you want.” I thought that was kind, any
how. “Yes,” said I, “I am their most humble servant.” (Great laughter.)
“Well,” said he, “what are you walking about on deck with them for, if
you are their servant?” I told him they were very courteous to me—putting
him off in that way. He then told me if I did not get out of the cabin, he
would split my head open. He was rather a diminutive being, and would not
have been a mouthful for any thing like a Tom Hyer5A popular New York gambler, horseman, and “sporting man," who was a political crony of Isaiah Rynders. New York Tribune, 14 January 1885. man. (Applause.)
However, seeing his Anglo-Saxon blood was up, I thought I would move
off; but tapping him on the shoulder, I told him I wanted to give him a piece
of advice: “I am a passenger, you are a servant; and therefore you should
always consult the wants of the passengers.” (Laughter.) He finally told
me he was ready to give me my dinner in the capacity of a servant, but not
otherwise. This acknowledgment told the whole story of American prejudice.
There were two or three slaveholders on board. One was a lady from
New Orleans; rather a dark-looking person—for individuals from that quar-
ter are dark, except the blacks, and they are getting lighter. (Laughter.)
This woman was perfectly horrified with my appearance, and she said to
gentlemen standing by, that she was really afraid to be near me, and that I
would draw a bowie-knife. Indeed, she had liked to have fainted. This
woman, I learned from good authority, owned three hundred slaves in
Louisiana; and yet she was afraid of a black man, and expected every
moment I would attempt to commit violence on her. At the time she was
affecting this horror of a negro, she was being waited on at the table by
colored men. It was, “Waiter, come here!” and “waiter, go there!” and
there they were actually cutting up the meat, standing right over it, quite
near those white persons who really shouted when I was driven out.
This tells the whole story. You have no prejudice against blacks—no
more than against any other color—but it is against the black man appearing
as the colored gentleman. He is then a contradiction of your theory of
natural inferiority in the colored race. It was not in consequence of my
complexion that I was driven out of the cabin, for I could have remained
there as a servant; but being there as a gentleman, having paid my own
passage, and being in company with intelligent, refined persons, was what
awakened the hatred, and brought down upon me the insulting manifestations
I have alluded to.
It is because the American Colonization Society cherishes and fosters
this feeling of hatred against the black man, that I am opposed to it. And I
am especially disposed to speak out my opposition to this colonization
scheme to-night, because not only of the renewed interest excited in the
colonization scheme by the efforts of Henry Clay and others, but because
there is a lecturer in the shape of the Rev. Mr. Miller,6Presbyterian minister John Miller. of New Jersey, now
in England, soliciting funds for our expatriation from this country, and
going about trying to organize a society, and to create an impression in
favor of removing us from this country. I would ask you, my friends, if this
is not mean and impudent in the extreme, for one class of Americans to ask
for the removal of another class? I feel, sir, I have as much right in this
country as any other man. I feel that the black man in this land has as much
right to stay in this land as the white man. Consider the matter in the light of
possession in this country. Our connection with this country is contemporaneous
with your own. From the beginning of the existence of this
people, as a people, the colored man has had a place upon the American
soil. To be sure, he was not driven from his home in pursuit of a greater
liberty than he enjoyed at home, like the Pilgrim fathers; but in the same
year that the Pilgrims were landing in this State, slaves were landing on the
James River, in Virginia.7Douglass errs in his chronology. The Pilgrims arrived in present-day Massachusetts in November 1620. Over a year earlier, in August 1619, an unidentified Dutch galley brought approximately twenty African "servants" to the English settlement at Jamestown, Virginia. The slave status of Africans in the colony did not become firmly fixed until later in the seventeenth century. George D. Langdon, Jr., Pilgrim Colony: A History of New Plymouth (New Haven, 1966), 1-2; Rice, Rise and Fall of Black Slavery, 52-56. We feel on this score, then, that we have as
much right here as any other class of people.
We have other claims to being regarded and treated as American citizens.
Some of our number have fought and bled for this country, and we
only ask to be treated as well as those who have fought against it. We are
lovers of this country, and we only ask to be treated as well as the haters of
it. We are not only told by Americans to go out of our native land to Africa,
and there enjoy our freedom—for we must go there in order to enjoy it—but
Irishmen newly landed on our soil, who know nothing of our institutions,
nor of the history of our country, whose toil has not been mixed with the
soil of the country as ours—have the audacity to propose our removal from
this, the land of our birth. For my part, I mean, for one, to stay in this
country; I have made up my mind to live among you. I had a kind offer,
when I was in England, of a little house and lot, and the free use of it, on the
banks of the river Eden. I could easily have staid there, if I had sought for
ease, undisturbed, unannoyed by American skin-aristocracy; for it is an
aristocracy of skin (applause),—those passengers on board the Alida only
got their dinner that day in virtue of color; if their skins had been of my
color, they would have had to fast all day. Whatever denunciations England
may be entitled to on account of her treatment of Ireland and her own
poor, one thing can be said of her, that no man in that country, or in any of
her dominions, is treated as less than a man on account of his complexion. I
could have lived there; but when I remembered this prejudice against color,
as it is called, and slavery, and saw the many wrongs inflicted on my people
at the North that ought to be combatted and put down, I felt a disposition to
lay aside ease, to turn my back on the kind offer of my friends, and to return
among you—deeming it more noble to suffer along with my colored brethren,
and meet these prejudices, than to live at ease, undisturbed, on the
other side of the Atlantic. (Applause.) I had rather be here now, encountering
this feeling, bearing my testimony against it, setting it at defiance, than
to remain in England undisturbed. I have made up my mind wherever I go, I
shall go as a man, and not as a slave. When I go on board of your steam-
boats, I shall always aim to be courteous and mild in my deportment
towards all with whom I come in contact, at the same time firmly and
constantly endeavoring to assert my equal right as a man and a brother.
But the Colonization Society says this prejudice can never be
overcome—that it is natural,—God has implanted it. Some say so; others
declare that it can only be removed by removing the cause, that is, by
removing us to Liberia. I know this is false, from my own experience in this
country. I remember that, but a few years ago, upon the railroads from New
Bedford and Salem and in all parts of Massachusetts, a most unrighteous
and proscriptive rule prevailed, by which colored men and women were
subjected to all manner of indignity in the use of those conveyances.
Anti-Slavery men, however, lifted up their testimony against this principle
from year to year; and from year to year, he whose name cannot be men-
tioned without receiving a round of applause, WENDELL PHILLIPS (ap-
plause), went abroad, exposing this proscription in the light of justice.8Abolitionists campaigned against the segregated seating arrangements required by several Massachusetts railroads, particularly the Eastern, the Boston and Providence, and the New Bedford and Taunton trunk lines. On 10 February 1842, Wendell Phillips, along with Ellis Gray Loring and Charles Lenox Remond, addressed a joint committee of the Massachusetts legislature to urge that such practices be prohibited by law. A full text of Phillips's remarks appears in Lib., 18 February 1842. Louis Ruchames, “Jim Crow Railroads in Massachusetts," American Quarlerly. 8: 61-75 (Spring 1956).
What is the result? Not a single railroad can be found in any part of
Massachusetts, where a colored man is treated and esteemed in any other
light than that of a man and a traveller. Prejudice has given way, and must
give way. The fact that it is giving way, proves that this prejudice is not
invincible. The time was, when it was expected that a colored man, when
he entered a church in Boston, would go into the Jim Crow pew—and I
believe such is the case now, to a large extent; but then there were those
who would defend the custom. But you can scarcely get a defender of this
proscription in New England now.
The history of the repeal of the intermarriage law shows that the prejudice
against color is not invincible.9Douglass refers to the 1843 Massachusetts law repealing the state's statutory ban on interracial marriages. Massachusetts law had first prohibited marriage and “fornication” between whites and Negroes or mulattoes in 1705. In 1786 a revised marriage law dropped the ban on fornication and extended the proscription of interracial marriages to include Indians. Garrison denounced the law, in what appears to have been the first public challenge of the law, in the second issue of the Liberator in 1831. Between 1838 and 1840, several women's antislavery societies led in the organization of a public campaign that, after a series of legislative setbacks, contributed to the law's repeal. By 1860 no other free state possessing such a law had followed Massachusetts' example. Indiana, Iowa, and Maine continued to ban racial intermarriage, though Iowa omitted the proscription from her revised marriage code of 1851. After 1843, Rhode Island, Michigan, California, and New Mexico enacted legislation prohibiting interracial marriages. Louis Ruchames, “Race, Marriage, and Abolition in Massachusetts," JNH, 40: 250-73 (July 1955); Henry W. Farnam, Chapters in the History of Social Legislation in the United States to 1860 (Washington, D.C., 1938), 216-17. The general manner in which white
persons sit with colored persons, shows plainly that the prejudice against
color is not invincible. When I first came here, I felt the greatest possible
diffidence to sitting with whites. I used to come up from the ship-yard
where I worked, with my hands hardened with toil, rough and uncomely,
and my movements awkward, (for I was unacquainted with the rules of
politeness), I would shrink back, and would not have taken my meals with
the whites, had they not pressed me to do so. Our president,10Wendell Phillips. NS, 8 June 1849. in his earlier
intercourse with me, taught me, by example, his abhorrence of this preju-
dice. He has, in my presence, stated to those who visited him, that if they
did not like to sit at the table with me, they could have a separate one for
themselves.
The time was, when I walked through the streets of Boston, I was liable
to insult, if in company with a white person. To-day I have passed in
company with my white friends, leaning on their arm and they on mine, and
yet the first word from any quarter on account of the color of my skin, I
have not heard. It is all false, this talk about the invincibility of prejudice
against color. If any of you have it, and no doubt some of you have, I will
tell you how to get rid of it. Commence to do something to elevate, and
improve and enlighten the colored man, and your prejudice will begin to
vanish. The more you try to make a man of the black man, the more you
will begin to think him a man.
(Mr. D[ouglass] here related an anecdote of his having visited, several
years ago, the town of Pittsfield, for the purpose of lecturing. He was
invited to the house of a friend, an anti-slavery man, but who was filled
with the prejudice against color. This man allowed him to walk to the place
of the lecture without offering to take him into his carriage, and then left
him, after the afternoon meeting, to come home alone. While standing
there, it came up to rain, and the Hon. _______, a pro-slavery man, invited
him into his house. The children, on seeing him enter, cried “Nigger,
nigger, ” and fled, and the whole family treated him with coldness. Deter-
mined to overcome it, he complained of a hoarseness, with which he was
affected, and asked Mrs. _______ if she would be kind enough to give him a
glass of cold water, with a little sugar in it, to relieve his cold. Mrs. _______
brought the articles, and Mr. D[ouglass] thanked her, he said, with a
swimming heart; and from that moment, her coldness and formality were
gone, and he was invited, whenever he visited Pittsfield again, to make his
stay at their house.)11Though the exact date of this incident has not been determined, Douglass later recalled that his visit to Pittsfield, New Hampshire, took place in 1842, when the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society sent him there to deliver a Sunday lecture. He had been advised that he could stay overnight in the home of a Mr. Hilles, a resident of Pittsfield who was a subscriber to the Liberator. When Hilles greeted him coolly and declined to join him at the table for tea, Douglass “suspected his trouble was colorphobia. ” On the morning of the lecture, Hilles and his wife rode off in their carriage, leaving their guest to walk to the town hall, where he was to hold two meetings. His afternoon lecture concluded. Douglass found himself on the street without shelter as a snowstorm threatened. “There was a graveyard near the town hall," he later remembered, “and, attracted thither, I felt some relief in contemplating the resting-places of the dead, where there was an end to all distinctions between rich and poor, white and colored, high and low." A prominent Democratic politician, Moses Norris, Jr. (1799-1855), who was to represent New Hampshire in the House (1843-47) and Senate (1849-55). spied Douglass, introduced himself, and invited Douglass home. “I am no Abolitionist," Douglass remembered Norris’s saying, “but if you will go with me I will take care of you." Douglass gratefully accepted Norris’s invitation, even though he vaguely remembered once having read about his host's role as prosecuting attorney against Methodist clergyman George Storrs, who had been arrested for violating a Pittsfield ordinance by delivering an abolitionist appeal from the pulpit of a local church in March 1836. The incident is related in greater detail in Douglass, Life and Times, 501-05. John L. Meyers, “The Major Effort of Antislavery Agents in New Hampshire, 1835-1837," Historical New Hampshire, 26: 11 (Fall 1971); Proceedings of the New Hampshire Historical Society, 3: 51-53 (1902); NCAB, 12: 394; ACAB, 4: 533; BDAC, 1393.
Mr. GARRISON desired to make a remark, with reference to the excla-
mation of the children on the approach of Mr. DOUGLASS, “There’s a
nigger in the house,” and their precipitate flight. It was the same kind of
feeling that was evinced on another occasion. When MUNGO PARK,12Mungo Park (1771-1806), a Scottish surgeon, undertook two pioneering explorations of the Niger River between 1795 and 1806. His published writings describe several occasions when, if not actually identified as the devil, he was nevertheless received with “fear,” “reverence,” “uneasiness," and “superstitious curiosity" by Africans who had seldom or never seen a white man. Mungo Park, Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa: Performed Under the Direction and Patronage of the African Association in the Years 1795, 1796, and 1797, 4th ed. (London, 1800), 55, 60, 124, 139, 184,193, 278, 295. the
celebrated English traveller, visited Africa, he found himself, at a certain
period, in a village where the inhabitants had never seen a white person
before. On going into one of the huts, the children who saw him enter,
exhibited great trepidation, and ran out with all possible expedition, crying,
“The devil! the devil!” (Great laughter.)
Mr. DOUGLASS.—It is a poor rule that won’t work both ways. (Laugh-
ter and applause.) Most people think their Lord is like themselves. A
certain very pious man was horribly shocked by hearing an abolitionist say,
that the negro was made in the image of God. The Lord is in their image,
they seem to think, and the devil in the image of the black man. (Laughter.)
I desire to bear my testimony, after hearing the eulogy pronounced by
Mr. Garrison, with regard to our departed brother and co-laborer, JOHN
MURRAY,¹³ of Scotland. About three years ago, I had the pleasure of
bidding that noble man farewell on the shores of Scotland; and I remember
well the deep interest he took in the anti-slavery questions of this country.
His last battle in behalf of the slave was with the Free Church of Scotland;
and while he lived, that Church, for its alliance with slaveholders—for
receiving their money into its treasury, and extending to them its fellowship
in return—obtained no repose. He bore a noble testimony against it; he had
borne a noble testimony against slavery before. For the last twenty-eight
years, JOHN MURRAY stood up in Scotland, the firm, the untiring, the
devoted friend of the slave. There are two or three colored persons, at least,
now in this Hall, who have shared his generous hospitality, and received
his hearty “God-speed,” in their endeavors to break down slavery and
prejudice against color in this country, by creating a public sentiment on
that side of the Atlantic that should react in favor of human liberty here. I
have no more to say respecting this good man; his consistent and irre-
proachable character is his best eulogy.
Some one has asked me to say a word about General Worth.14Scottish abolitionist John Murray (?-1849) of Bowling Bay, near Glasgow, was among the founders of the Glasgow Emancipation Society in 1833. While working as a carpenter and builder of houses in St. Kitts, where he had taken up residence to recover from a pulmonary infection, Murray became an outspoken critic ofslavery. Upon returning to Glasgow in the mid-1820s, Murray opened a spirit shop but abandoned the business when he became a temperance advocate. As co-secretary (1833-49) of the Glasgow Emancipation Society, Murray organized antislavery lecture series in Scotland, attacked proslavery advocates in the articles that he regularly contributed to several Glasgow papers, and played a major role in maintaining the Glasgow Emancipation Society's ties with Garrisonian abolitionists in the United States. A garbled text of Garrison's eulogy of Murray, in which Garrison is mistakenly reported as having informed the meeting of “the death of a colored friend and coadjutor on the other side of the Atlantic," appears in NS, 15 June 1849. James McCune Smith, “John Murray (of Glasgow)," in Autographs for Freedom, ed. Julia Griffiths (Boston, 1853), 62-67; Lib., 1 June 1849; Henry C. Wright to Garrison, 7 June 1849, in Lib., 29 June 1849; R[ichard] D. Webb to [Sidney Howard] Gay, 8 April 1849, in NASS, 24 May 1849; C. Duncan Rice, “The Scottish Factor in the Fight Against American Slavery, 1830-1870" (PhD. diss., University of Edinburgh, 1969), 45, 216-18. 14. 14Born of Quaker parents, William Jenkins Worth (1794-1849) nevertheless became one of the nation's leading military officers. After a common school education, Worth was a store clerk when he enlisted for service in the War of 1812. Worth's gallantry under fire led to a rapid series of promotions that left him a twenty-year-old major in the regular army at the war's end. For the next thirty years he served in a variety of military positions including campaigns against the Seminoles in Florida. In the Mexican War, Worth fought with distinction first under Zachary Taylor and later under Winfield Scott. After the war, Worth was placed in command of the Department of Texas, where he died of cholera on 17 May 1849. The Boston newspaper's response to Douglass's comments on Worth has not been located. NCAB, 4: 506; ACAB, 6: 615-16; DAB, 20: 536-37. I only
know General Worth by his acts in Mexico and elsewhere, in the service of
this slaveholding and slave-trading government. I know why that question
is put: it is because one of your city papers, which does not rise to the
dignity of being called a paper—a sheet of the basest sort—has said that my
tongue ought to be cut out by its roots, because, upon hearing of the death
of that man, I made use of the remark—(it is not stated in what connection I
made it, or where)—that another legalized murderer had gone to his account.
I say so yet! (Loud cheering and some hisses.) I will not undertake to
defend what I then said, or to show up his character or history. You know as
well as I do, that Faneuil Hall has resounded with echoing applause of a
denunciation of the Mexican war, as a murderous war—as a war against the
free States—as a war against freedom, against the negro, and against the
interests of the workingmen of this country—and as a means of extending
that great evil and damning curse, negro slavery. (Immense applause.)
Why may not the oppressed say, when an oppressor is dead, either by
disease or by the hand of the foeman on the battlefield, that there is one the
less of his oppressors left on earth? For my part, I would not care if,
to-morrow, I should hear of the death of every man who engaged in that
bloody war in Mexico, and that every man had met the fate he went there to
perpetrate upon unoffending Mexicans. (Applause and hisses.)
A word more. There are three millions of slaves in this land, held by the
U.S. government, under the sanction of the American Constitution, with
all the compromises and guarantees contained in that instrument in favor of
the slave system. Among those guarantees and compromises is one by
which you, the citizens of Boston, have sworn, before God, that three
millions of slaves shall be slaves or die—that your swords and bayonets and
arms shall, at any time at the bidding of the slaveholder, through the legal
magistrate or governor of a slave State, be at his service in putting down the
slaves. With eighteen millions of freemen standing upon the quivering
hearts of three millions of slaves, my sympathies, of course, must be with
the oppressed. I am among them, and you are treading them beneath your
feet. The weight of your influence, numbers, political combinations and
religious organizations, and the power of your arms, rest heavily upon
them, and serve at this moment to keep them in their chains. When I
consider their condition—the history of the American people—how they
bared their bosoms to the storm of British artillery, in order to resist simply
a three-penny tea tax, and to assert their independence of the mother
country—I say, in view of these things, I should welcome the intelligence
to-morrow, should it come, that the slaves had risen in the South, and that
the sable arms which had been engaged in beautifying and adorning the
South, were engaged in spreading death and devastation there. (Marked
sensation.) There is a state of war at the South, at this moment. The
slaveholder is waging a war of aggression on the oppressed. The slaves are
now under his feet. Why, you welcomed the intelligence from France, that
Louis Philippe had been barricaded in Paris—you threw up your caps in
honor of the victory achieved by Republicanism over Royalty—you
shouted aloud—“Long live the republic!”—and joined heartily in the
watchword of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”—and should you not hail,
with equal pleasure, the tidings from the South, that the slave had risen, and
achieved for himself, against the iron-hearted slaveholder, what the republicans
of France achieved against the royalists of France? (Great applause,
and some hissing.)