The Skin Aristocracy in America: An Address Delivered in Coventry, England, on February 2, 1847
THE SKIN ARISTOCRACY IN AMERICA: AN ADDRESS
DELIVERED IN COVENTRY, ENGLAND, ON 2 FEBRUARY 1847
Coventry Herald and Observer, 5 February 1847.
On the evening of 2 February 1847 a “very large number of persons, many of
them ladies and children,” filled St. Mary’s Hall in Coventry, England, to
hear Douglass speak. Under the motion of Charles Bray, the Reverend John
Sibree chaired the meeting. At the conclusion of Douglass’s speech, which
was described as “lengthy and powerful,” Sibree rose and “proposed the
thanks of the meeting to Mr. Douglass for his very able address, which was
passed unanimously, and the meeting separated.”
Mr. DOUGLASS commenced by observing that the sight of that meeting,
with its “sea of upturned faces,” reanimated him with the hope that the day
was not far distant when there would not be a slave in all the world. As that
meeting might not exactly understand the nature of slavery, he would give a
synopsis of the subject.
Slavery, as practised in the slave-holding States of America, was the
claim of one man to hold property in the person of another, so that if the
slave took his own earnings it was stealing; he could not look upon himself
as his own, but was treated, used, and looked upon as a “chattel personal,”
herded with the beasts of the field, and, like them, submitted to be punished
without restraint, and bought and sold in the public market. That was the
relation of the master to the slave in America, and cruelty was inseparable
from such a system, for without it such a relation could not exist.
What was it that impelled the white man to labour, to till the fields, to
plough, and sow, and reap? Not, surely, the love of labour; no, it was the
hope of reward. The slave had no such hope; he could never look for
reward, therefore he must be flogged to his work. He knew it had been said
that it was not the interest of masters to ill-treat their slaves, any more than
it was the interest of a man who kept horses to ill-treat them. But were there
not numberless instances where horses were ill-fed and cruelly treated,
sometimes to the death? And even so it was with slaves. But the human
being—the slave—was out of his place as a beast of burden. Hence it
required even harsher treatment to keep him in that condition. You must
bore out his intellectual eye—blind him to his humanity—for the slave-
owner well knows that while there is a spark of the divinity in his soul, he
cannot reckon upon keeping him a slave, and accordingly it must be blotted
out.
But it was not necessary, he should hope, to prove to them that slavery
was cruel. He knew that the mere outrage, upon abstract justice, was
enough to excite the deepest hatred against the system in the hearts of a
British audience. His object was to show the degree of unnatural hatred
which was felt by Republican and Christian America against the coloured
man.
There were in that country 500,000 nominally free coloured people,
doomed to all ignoble employments. Every attempt was made to keep them
out of respectable society, and confine them to a low grade of life, that they
might feel themselves a degraded class. A black man is an American’s
prejudice. In the war with England, America had induced her slaves to fight
for her, upon the promise of granting them their independence. The negroes
fought nobly, and the victory at [New] Orleans was the result. But when the
contest was over, the musket was taken from their shoulders, the whip
applied to their backs, and they were driven back to the fields to slavery.1During the War of 1812 the New York state legislature authorized the raising of two black regiments to help repel an anticipated British invasion. Slaves could enlist with their masters' consent and were promised freedom after three years' service. The bill, however, was not enacted until October 1814, only a few months before the war's end. The Negro in the Military Service of the United States, 1639-1886, National Archives Microfilm Publication no. T-823, reel 1, pages 330-31.
No matter how great in respect to his wealth or intelligence a negro might
be, in that country he was denied all station, all respect, all influence. There
was a skin aristocracy in America; no, not exactly the skin, it was the colour
of the skin, that was the mark of distinction, or the brand of degradation. To
such an extent was this feeling carried, that if a white man, if, for instance,
his honoured friend the Chairman, were to walk with him through some of
the streets in the cities of that country, as he had walked with him here, he
would run the risk of being hooted and mobbed.
He would relate a circumstance which had happened to himself, and
which would illustrate this feeling. He was travelling on one occasion in the
night, when we are all of one colour. Some passengers were taken up upon
the road. It being dark, they did not see his colour. There was conversation,
he joined in it, his opinions were received with the utmost deference. It was
sir this, and sir the other. He discussed the question of the Corn Laws, then
agitating in England, and so pleased was he with the spirit and friendliness
which animated the party, that he began to hope darkness would take the
place of day; but the dreaded morning light was coming, and when the
glorious sun burst in its magnificence over the mountain tops in the East,
lo, there was a peeping under the brim of his hat, and the friend who sat next
[to] him suddenly cried out, “he's a nigger.” The friendly correspondence
stopped from that moment. He was looked at askance with glances of
disgust, which seemed to accuse and blame him for not having proclaimed
himself a negro. Even in the Church-yard there was a place put apart for the
bones of the coloured man.
But the hatred of the American was especially roused against the
intellectual coloured man. When he is degraded, they can bear with him; he
is in the condition which they think natural to him; but if he is intelligent
and moral, then there is a contradiction to their theory. If a negro were to
rival a Webster in eloquence, a Wesley in piety, a Brougham in learning, or
a Sir Robert Peel in political knowledge,2Daniel Webster (1782-1852), the conservative Massachusetts Whig who during a forty-year career in national politics served terms as congressman, senator, and secretary of state, was known for his oratorical ability and debating skill. John Wesley (1703-91), English clergyman, evangelist, and missionary, was the driving force behind the emergence of modern Methodism. Lord Henry Peter Brougham was founder of the Edinburgh Review and an educational reformer. Sir Robert Peel (1788-1850), a conservative British statesman who served as M.P. (1809-50), first lord of the treasury and chancellor of the exchequer (1834-35), and prime minister (1841-45, 1845-46), was celebrated for his political acumen. Many of Peel's political insights were collected in W. T. Haly’s 1843 volume The Opinions of Sir Robert Peel, Dictionary of National Biography, 21 vols. (London, 1921-22), 15: 655-68, 20: 1214-25; Dictionary of American Biography, 20 vols. (New York, 1928-36), 119: 585-92. an American would not tolerate
him. The speaker here gave some anecdotes illustrative of the contempt
which is felt for the negro, and also in answer to the assertion which had
been made that the coloured man is devoid of natural affection.
It was impossible to find a people more destitute of moral feeling than
those of America. For sixty years they had boastingly proclaimed in their
professed love of freedom a notorious lie. If you want to know an American,
find out the opposite of all his professions. When he talks of freedom,
remember his three millions of slaves. Recollect when he talks of religion,
that his Church is built on skulls, and that his humanity is bespoke by the
fetters and the groans of his victims. What but abuse and detraction is the
freedom of his press? Remember that in that boasted land of freedom, the
Post-Office is not secure. In Charleston, South Carolina, they suspected
some correspondence, and having seized and rifled the mail bags, they
strewed the contents about the streets.3Infuriated by the American Anti-Slavery Society’s postal campaign of 1835, a mob of angry South Carolinians broke into the Charleston post office on the night of 29 July and seized several mailbags of abolitionist literature. The antislavery tracts were publicly burned next day in a huge bonfire on the Charleston parade grounds. This incident marked the beginning of a period of vigilante rule and extralegal mail censorship. William W. Freehling, Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816-1836 (New York, 1965), 340-42; Frank Otto Gatell, ed., “Postmaster Huger and the Incendiary Publications," South Carolina Historical Magazine, 64: 193-201 (October 1963); Clement Eaton, The Freedom-of-Thought Struggle in the Old South (New York, 1964), 196-215. Look at the way in which the right
of petition had been treated there. Half a million of signatures flung with
the utmost contempt in the faces of the petitioners.4By the winter of 1835-36 the controversy over southern mail censorship had become closely linked with the petition question. Southern determination to suppress discussion of slavery on all fronts resulted in the adoption of the 1836 congressional “gag rule," which required the permanent tabling of all antislavery petitions. Freehling, Prelude to Civil War, 348-53. If such a thing had
occurred in England, it would have excited an earthquake of agitation. Mr.
Douglass here alluded to the sum of money which his friends in this country
had sent over to America to purchase his freedom.
The reason why he spoke in such unmeasured terms of the Americans
was, he wanted the people of this country to form a right estimate of them.
It might be said, why provoke them? His object was to provoke them. It
was in the moral world as in the physical. There were cases which required
irritation. Now the American conscience needed blistering. (Laughter.)
Talk of an American, only see him, how he prides himself upon being the
smartest man in all creation. His first question is, “now what do you think
of me?” his next, “what do you think of my country?” They would now
know what answer to return to these questions.
The speaker then went on to describe a visit he had made the day before
to the birth-place of England’s greatest poet.5Details of Douglass's movements during February 1847 are extremely sketchy. He may have visited Shakespeare's birthplace at Stratford-on-Avon, which is some twenty miles from Coventry. There he was struck by
seeing on the walls the names of Americans from every State of the Union.
These persons had been going through the country, representing the subject
of slavery in anything but its true light. He found that not a single person
who had been brought in contact with these travellers, but had been infected
by them with false notions on slavery. It was, therefore, but just, that
one slave breaking loose from his fetters, should come to disabuse the
minds of the people of England, and set them right upon this subject.
There were, it was true, exceptions to the statements he had made, and
he rejoiced that a great change had come over a portion of the public mind
of New England within the last few years. Once he was travelling in that
district; he stepped into a Railway car at Lynn, and had not been there long,
when a little white man also got in and ordered him to withdraw. He
showed him his ticket; it was of no avail. The man still continued to demand
that he (Mr. Douglass) should take himself off. He asked this person the
reason why he made such a request, and he replied, “Why, you know you
are a negro.” “I denied it,” said Mr. Douglass, “for you know,” he
continued, “I am but half a negro; betwixt and between, as they say.” By
the way, on one occasion when I was relating this anecdote, an Irishman
who sat beneath me, said to his comrade near him, “Och, is that little man
only half a negro: then what would a whole one be?"—(Laughter.)—“Well,
my white fellow-passenger left me to get help, in order to turn me out; but
determining not to go with any will of my own, I placed myself so as to
cause them some trouble to remove me.” The speaker then described how
he was torn from the carriage, and thrown out by the road side amidst the
taunting cheers of the people, who told him to remember that was what he
would get for presuming to sit among white people. That was four years
ago; but so great had been the change in Lynn, where this had occurred, that
he could now go into that town and be greeted with the utmost kindness and
respect by the very men who had formerly been guilty of that outrage. A
similar change had also come over the religious community of Lynn; they
had become ashamed of the unchristian distinctions which had separated
the coloured man from the white man at their communion table, and all
alike now partook of the holy sacrament.
At this part of the address, the Hall was so excessively crowded, as to
cause considerable inconvenience to those who were sitting in the back
seats, and there was a short pause in consequence of the noise arising from
this circumstance. After which, at the request of the Chairman, Mr. Douglass
gave an outline of his own history, which, together with the eloquent
remarks uttered towards the conclusion of his address, our space will not
permit us to report. In allusion to the object of his visit to this country he
observed, that he wanted Englishmen to ask themselves what they felt upon
this question, and if they had made up their minds to assist the slaves. He
asked them to demand the abolition of slavery in America. Let the protest
go forth on the wings of the press; for the voice of England would be
potential on this subject.
The speaker then appealed to the ladies of Coventry in behalf of the
Anti-Slavery Bazaar at Boston, which was established for the sale of articles
wrought in needle-work, the proceeds being devoted to the printing
and gratuitous circulation of tracts and other publications on the subject of
slavery. Besides the pecuniary value of the articles contributed, there was a
moral worth in the influence upon the hearts of those who made them.
Many of the large towns of England had engaged to send boxes of fancy
work to the Bazaar at Boston, and he hoped Coventry would do the same.
The speaker, after again describing the nature of the claim which the
subject had upon the English people, concluded his address amidst the
cheers of the assembly, by requesting the names of those ladies who might
feel disposed to aid in the practical furtherance of the object, by receiving
the contributions of the inhabitants of Coventry.