The Triumphs and Challenges of the Abolitionist Crusade: An Address Delivered in New York, New York, on May 9, 1848
THE TRIUMPHS AND CHALLENGES OF THE ABOLITIONIST
CRUSADE: AN ADDRESS DELIVERED IN NEW YORK,
NEW YORK, ON 9 MAY 1848
North Star, 2 June 1848. Other texts in New York Herald, 10 May 1848; New York Daily
Tribune, 10 May 1848; Liberator, 26 May 1848; National Anti-Slavery Standard, 18 May
1848; Pennsylvania Freeman, 25 May 1848; Anti-Slavery Bugle, 9 June 1848; Foner,
Life and Writings, 5: 78-85.
The well-publicized fourteenth anniversary meeting of the American Anti-
Slavery Society opened on 9 May 1848 at the Broadway Tabernacle in New
York City. The National Anti-Slavery Standard reported that the vast hall
“was crowded, more so, we think, than we have ever seen it on a similar
occasion.” Seated on the platform were many of the luminaries of the
abolitionist movement, including Isaac T. Hopper, Francis Jackson, Samuel
J. May, William Wells Brown, Edmund Quincy, Charles L. Remond, Abby
Kelley Foster, Parker Pillsbury, and John Pierpont. Above their heads, draped
from pillar to pillar, hung a mammoth petition from forty thousand Scottish
women urging their American sisters to embrace the abolitionist cause. At
10:00 A.M. William Lloyd Garrison called the meeting to order, after which
Theodore Parker, Lucretia Mott, and Wendell Phillips delivered lengthy ad-
dresses. Douglass followed Phillips. Henry Clapp, writing for the Lynn
(Mass) Pioneer, thought all the speakers were “powerful . . . yet, with the
exception of Douglass, who did not have his chance till the audience were
almost wearied out, their speeches seemed to pass by like the idle wind. Even
Douglass was far from being himself, partly because he was annoyed by the
flight of a large number of the wearied people just he rose." The meeting,
which Douglass believed “far transcended any which we have heretofore
attended,” adjourned at 2:00 P.M. Garrison to Sydney Howard Gay, 27 April,
1 May 1848, in Merrill and Ruchames, Garrison Letters, 3: 552—54; Henry
C. Wright to Andrew Paton, 9 May 1848, in Lib., 12 May 1848; NASS, 23
March, 4, 11 May 1848; Lib., 31 March 1848; NS, 7 April, 19 May 1848;
New York Daily Tribune, 9 May I848.
Mr. Chairman and Ladies and Gentlemen—It is with great hesitation that
I consent to rise here to speak, after the able speech to which you have just
listened. I had far rather remain a listener to others, than to become myself a
speaker at this stage of the proceedings of this meeting. I do not hope to be
able, in the few remarks I have to make, to say anything new or eloquent,
if, indeed, anything new were needed, for it will be time enough to discuss
new truths when old ones shall have been recognized and adopted.
For seventeen years, Mr. Chairman, the Abolitionists of the United
States have been encountering obloquy, scorn, and opposition of the most
furious character, for uttering—what? Their conviction that a MAN IS A
MAN; that every man belongs to himself and to no one else. In propagating
this idea, this simple proposition, we have met with all sorts of opposition,
and with all sorts of arguments, drawn from the Bible, from the Constitu-
tion, and from philosophy, till at length many have arrived at the sage
conclusion that a man is something else than a man, and that he has not the
rights of a man. An event has just occurred in the District of Columbia, the
capital of the country, known to you all, which furnishes the proof of this
assertion. Some seventy-seven men, women, and children, took it into
their heads, contrary to the Constitution, that they were MEN—not three-
fifihs of men—that they would leave the refined avocation of blacking boots
for nothing for members of Congress and seek an asylum from oppression
and tyranny in some of the Northern States, or under the protection of the
British Lion in Canada. The sequel is well known; they were pursued by a
band of armed men, overtaken, and brought back in chains, and the men
who aided them in their flight are in a dungeon, and there they will probably
end their lives.1In mid-April 1848 some seventy-seven slaves from the District of Columbia tried unsuccessfully to reach freedom on board the schooner Pearl, a small coasting vessel manned by Captain Edward Sayres and Chester English, a sailor and cook. Directing the attempted escape was supercargo Daniel Drayton of Philadelphia, himself a seasoned captain in the coasting trade who had collaborated in previous slave rescues. Arriving at Washington on 13 April, the Pearl surreptitiously took the black fugitives on board two nights later and started down the Potomac, only to be halted by high winds at the entrance to Chesapeake Bay. Alarmed slaveholders, aided by a Negro informant, gave pursuit and captured the anchored vessel in the predawn hours of 17 April. The following morning the bound and shackled prisoners were returned to Washington, where their arrival produced great excitement. An angry mob gathered at the District of Columbia jail threatening to lynch Drayton and Sayres, while a second mob attacked the office of the National Era, Gamaliel Bailey's antislavery newspaper. The Pearl incident generated considerable sympathy and indignation in abolitionist circles, yet public outcries failed to save either the slaves or their white rescuers from a harsh fate. Northern sympathizers ultimately secured freedom for most of the fourteen-member Edmondson family of slaves, but the bulk of the Pearl fugitives were sold South by the Alexandria, Virginia, slave-trading firm of Bruin and Hill. Chester English received immunity from prosecution in exchange for his testimony. After lengthy court battles in which each was convicted on numerous counts of assisting in the escape of slaves, Drayton and Sayres were sentenced to heavy fines and long prison terms. Before receiving a presidential pardon from Millard Fillmore in 1852, both men spent over four years in the Washington jail. Lib., 21 , 28 April, 5 May 1848; NS, 28 April, 5 May, 23 June 1848; FDP, 10 September 1852; Daniel Drayton, Personal Memoir of Daniel Drayton, For Four Years and Four Months A Prisoner (For Charity's Sake) in Washington Jail; Including a Narrative of the Voyage and Capture of the Schooner Pearl (Boston, 1853), 20122; John H. Paynter, “The Fugitives of the Pearl," JNH, 1: 243-64 (July 1916); Thomas Ducket to [?] Bigelow, 18 February 1850, in John W. Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies (Baton Rouge, 1977), 89.
Very little is thought about this affair—very little noise is made about
it. It excites about as much remark, and about as much sympathy, as if as
many horses had broken away from the halters of their owners, and again
been recovered.
Sir, we have, in this country, no adequate idea of humanity yet; the
nation does not feel that these are men, it cannot see, through the dark skin
and curly hair of the black man, anything like humanity, or that has claims
to human rights. Had they been white men and women, or were they
regarded as human beings, this nation would have been agitated to its
centre, and rocked as with an earthquake, and like the nations of the old
world, would have rung with the thunders of freedom against tyranny, at
such an event as this. We do not regard these men as formed in the image of
God. We do not see that in the persons of these men and women whose
rights have been stricken down, whose virtuous attempt to gain their free-
dom has been defeated, the violation of the common rights of man. Even
the gallant Hale,2John Parker Hale (1806-73), congressman (1843-45) and senator (1847-53, 1855-65) from New Hampshire, and minister to Spain (1865-69), was the presidential nominee of the moribund Liberty party in 1847-48 and ofthe Free Soil party in 1852. Read out of the regular Democratic party in 1845 because of his opposition to Texas annexation, Hale helped forge an antislavery coalition of Whigs and Independent Democrats that gained control of the New Hampshire legislature in 1846 and elected him to the U.S. Senate. Unhampered by partisan ties, Hale emerged during the first two years of his term as virtually the sole antislavery spokesman in the upper chamber. His approach to abolitionism was often indirect and legalistic, however, as exemplified by his response to the 1848 Pearl incident. Although deeply moved by the plight of the recaptured fugitives, Hale did not openly attack slavery or the slave trade but instead raised the issue of proslavery mobs. On 20 April 1848, two days after the mob attack on the National Era office, he introduced a bill to make local communities in the District of Columbia liable for damage to private property by any “riotous or tumultuous assemblage of people." The bill contained no specific mention of slavery, yet it produced heated responses from several southern senators, including Henry S. Foote, who threatened to lynch Hale if the New Hampshireman ever ventured inside the state of Mississippi. The Pearl incident and its aftermath enhanced Hale's stature among most abolitionists and helped to solidify his antislavery convictions. Within two months Hale introduced an unsuccessful resolution for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. Richard H. Sewell, John P. Hale and the Politics of Abolition (Cambridge, Mass, 1965), 107-19; Congressional Globe, 30th Cong, 1st sess., Appendix, 500—10; Lib., 5 May 1848. of the Liberty party, does not dare to speak of the men
who aided their escape, as having done a noble deed. To be sure, he can
bring in a proposition for the better protection of property in the District of
Columbia, but he makes no allusion whatever to the rights of black men.
This proposition in relation to the rights of property, is regarded by his
adherents as a noble act; as a timely measure; as indicating great courage
and heroism. Nor do I care to deny it. But what is the inference? If it be a
noble act, a courageous act, to move in the Capitol of the nation, in the
Senate of the United States, a bill to protect property from the assaults of a
brutal and ferocious mob—if that be bold, of course it would be no less
daring and fanatical to move in that District that the rights of man be
protected. (Applause)
I do not propose to make a lengthy speech, but I would like to say a few
words about how these things look to others.
“O wad some power the giftie gie us,
To see oursels as others see us."3Douglass quotes from the eighth stanza of Robert Burns’s poem “To A Louse, On Seeing One on a Lady‘s Bonnet, at Church." Alexander Smith, ed., The Complete Works of Robert Burns (New York, 1884 and 1887), 74.
I would like to hold up to you a picture; not drawn by an American pen or
pencil, but by a foreigner. I want to show you how you look abroad in the
delectable business of kidnapping and slavedriving. Some time since—I
think it was in the December number of “Punch”—I saw an excellent
pictorial description of America.4Punch , a weekly comic and satirical magazine, began publication in London in 1841 and was initially identified with a variety of radical or reformist causes. During its early years the journal attracted the services of numerous distinguished illustrators, including John Beech, Archibald Henning, and Richard Doyle. The drawing to which Douglass refers, “The Land of Liberty Recommended to the Consideration of ‘Brother Jonathan,'" appears in Punch, 13: 215 (4 December 1847). Douglass discusses the picture at length in NS, 14 January 1848. What think you it was? It was entitled,
“Brother Jonathan.” It was a long, lean, gaunt, shrivelled looking crea-
ture, stretched out on two chairs, and his legs resting on the prostrate bust of
Washington; projecting from behind was a cat-o’-nine-tails knotted at the
ends; around his person he wore a belt, in which were stuck those truly
American implements, a bowie-knife, dirk, and revolving pistol; behind
him was a whipping-post, with a naked woman tied to it, and a strong-
armed American citizen in the act of scourging her livid flesh with a
cowskin. At his feet was another group:—a sale going on of human cattle,
and around the auctioneer’s table were gathered the respectability—the
religion represented in the person of the clergy—of America, buying them
for export to the goodly city of New Orleans. Little further on, there was a
scene of branding—a small group of slaves tied hand and foot, while their
patriotic and philanthropic masters were burning their name into their
quivering flesh. Further on, there was a drove of slaves, driven before the
lash to a ship moored out in the stream, bound for New Orleans. Above
these and several other scenes illustrative of the character of our institu-
tions, waved the star-Spangled banner. Still further back in the distance was
the picture of the achievements of our gallant army in Mexico, shooting,
stabbing, hanging, destroying property, and massacring the innocent with
the innocent, not with the guilty, and over all this was a picture of the devil
himself, looking down with satanic satisfaction on passing events. (Laugh-
ter.) Here I conceive to be a true picture of America, and I hesitate not to
say that this description falls far short of the real facts, and of the aspect we
bear to the world around us.
Sir, although we have heard conflicting views uttered here to-day, of
hopeful and desponding aspect, (if, indeed, we have any desponding as-
pects brought to us), still, I think much more may be said in behalf of the
hopeful aspects. The signs of the times have already been alluded to; we
have very properly gone beyond the limits of the United States.
I see some of the audience are going out, which makes me think I have
spoken long enough: some plants thrive better by being cut off, and perhaps
my speech may as well be cut off here; not because there is not more to be
said, but because your energies have been taxed quite enough already.
(Cries of go on!) Since, then, you wish me to proceed, and, as Henry Clay
says, “I am always subject to the will of the people,” there may yet be
room for something of a speech.
As I was proceeding to remark concerning the hopeful aspects of the
times, I wish to bring with more distinctness before your minds the news
which comes from abroad—the action of the Provisional Government of
France. We have been accustomed, in this country, to hear much talk about
Christian America and Infidel France. I want to say on behalf of France,
that I go for that infidelity, no matter how heinous it may be in the estima-
tion of the American people, which strikes the chains from the hands of our
brethren; and against that Christianity which puts them on (applause); for
that infidelity which, in the person of Cremieux, one of the members of the
Provisional Government of France, speaks to the black and mulatto men
that come to congratulate them, and express their sentiments upon the
immediate emancipation of their brethren in the French islands. I sym-
pathize with that infidelity that speaks to them in language like this—
friends! brothers! men! (Applause) In France, the negro is a man, while you
who are throwing up your caps, waving your banners, and making beauti-
ful speeches in behalf of liberty, deny us our humanity, and traffic in our
flesh. Sir, I would like to bring more vividly before this audience, the
wrongs of my down-trodden countrymen. I have no disposition to look at
this matter in any sentimental light, but to bring before you stern facts, and
keep forever before the American people the damning and disgraceful fact
that three millions of people are in chains to-day; that while we are here
speaking in their behalf, saying noble words and doing noble deeds, they
are under the yoke, smarting beneath the lash, sundered from each other,
trafficked in and brutally treated; and that the American nation, to keep
them in their present condition, stands ready with its ten thousand
bayonets, to plunge them into their hearts, if they attempt to strike for their
freedom. I want every man north of Mason and Dixon’s line, whenever
they attend an anti-slavery meeting, to remember that it is the Northern arm
that does this; that you are not only guilty of withholding your influence,
but that you are the positive enemies of the slave, the positive holders of the
slave, and that in your right arm rests the physical power that keeps him
under the yoke. (Applause) I want you to feel that I am addressing
slaveholders, speaking to men who have entered into a solemn league and
covenant with the slaveholders of the country, that in any emergency, if at
any time the spirit of freedom finds a lodgment in the bosom of the American
slave, and they shall be moved to throw up barricades against their
tyrants, as the French did in the streets of Paris, that you, every man of you
that swears to support the Constitution, is sworn to pour leaden death in
their hearts. I am speaking to slaveholders, and if I speak plainly, set it not
down to impudence, but to opposition to slavery. For God’s sake, let a man
speak when he cannot do anything else; when fetters are on his limbs, let
him have this small right of making his wrongs known; at least, let it be
done in New York. I am glad to see there is a disposition to let it be done
here—to allow him to tell what is in him, with regard to his own personal
wrongs at any rate.
Sir, I have been frequently denounced because I have dared to speak
against the American nation, against the church, the northern churches
especially, charging them with being the slaveholders of the country. I
desire to say here as elsewhere, that I am not at all ambitious of the ill
opinions of my countrymen, nor do I desire their hatred; but I must say, as I
have said, that I want no man’s friendship, no matter how high he may
stand in church or state. I want no man’s sympathies or approbation who is
not ready to strike the chains from the limbs of my brethren. I do not ask the
esteem and friendship of any minister or any man, no matter how high his
standing, nor do I wish to shake any man’s hand who stands indifferent to
the wrongs of my brethren. Some have boasted that when Fred. Douglass
has been at their houses, he has been treated kindly, but as soon as he got
into their pulpits he began to abuse them—that as soon as the advantage is
given him, he takes it to stab those who befriend him. Friends, I wish to
stab no man, but if you stand on the side of the slaveholder, and cry out
“the Union as it is, ” “the Constitution as it is,” “the Church as it is,” you
may expect that the heart that throbs beneath this bosom, will give utter-
ance against you. I am bound to speak, and whenever there is an opportu-
nity to do so, I WILL speak against slavery.
I meant to have said a word about Colonization, as I observed there was
a very dark looking individual here, (Gov. Pinney, of Liberia),5John Brooke Pinney (1806-82), white Presbyterian clergyman and educator, was closely associated with Liberia and the American Colonization Society throughout his long career. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Pinney graduated from the University of Georgia in 1828 and from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1832. After his ordination by the Presbytery of Philadelphia in October 1832, he accepted an appointment as missionary to Liberia from the Western Foreign Missionary Association and arrived in Monrovia in early 1833. He returned for a brief period to the United States to recover his health. and was later selected as the American Colonization Society's colonial agent in Liberia. He served only six months in 1834 before he again fell ill. Returning to the United States in October 1835, Pinney remained for the next several decades an active lecturer and fund raiser for the colonizationist movement. He also served as New England agent of the American Colonization Society and as corresponding secretary of the state colonization societies of Pennsylvania and New York, being affiliated with the latter at the time of Douglass‘s speech. Pinney made several subsequent visits to Liberia and in 1878 served briefly as president of the American-financed and -controlled Liberia College. He died at his home near Ocala, Florida, where he had moved shortly after his seventy-fifth binhday. Alfred Nevin, ed., Encyclopedia of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, Including the Northern and Southern Assemblies (Philadelphia, 1884), 621; American Colonization Society, Sixty-Sixth Annual Report (Washington, 1883), 7; African Repository and Colonial Journal, 12: 18, 305, 24: 316-17 (January, October 1836, October 1848); C. Abayomi Cassell, Liberia: History of the First African Republic (New York, 1970), 296. for whose
special benefit I wished to say something on that subject. But as I do not see
him here now, there is no necessity to discuss this subject for his benefit.
When he was pointed out to me, I thought it quite remarkable that so dark a
man should be in favor of colonization; but there are some simple minded
men even among colored people! (Laughter.) I will just say, however, that
we have had some advice given us lately, from very high authority. I allude
to Henry Clay, who, in his last speech before the Colonization Society, at
Washington, advised the free colored people of the United States that they
had better go to Africa.6A lifelong supporter of African colonization, Henry Clay presided at the first organizational meeting of the American Colonization Society in 1816 and served as the Society's president from 1836 until his death in 1852. Douglass refers to Clay's speech before the Society on 18 January 1848, in which the Kentuckian voiced the familiar colonizationist argument that “the free white race and the colored race never could live together on terms of equality." Noting that the Israelites had never considered Egypt their homeland while “captives” there, Clay posed the rhetorical question: “Who can doubt that Africa is the real home of the black man, though, as a casual event, he may have had his birth on these shores?" Clement Eaton, Henry Clay and the Art of American Politics (Boston, 1957), 131-36; James M. Gifford, “Some New Light on Henry Clay and the American Colonization Society," Filson Club History Quarterly 50: 372-74 (October 1976); Africa Repository and Colonial Journal, 24: 78-88 (March 1848). See NS, 28 January 1848, for a more extensive critique of Clay's speech by Douglass.
He says he does not wish to coerce us, but thinks we had better go!
(Laughter and applause.) What right has he to tell us to go? We have as
much right to stay here as he has. (Laughter.) I don’t care if you did throw
up your caps for him when he came to this city—l don’t care if he did give
you “his heart on the outside of the City Hall and his hand on the inside,” I
have as much right to stay here as he has!7Henry Clay‘s visit to New York City as the official guest of the mayor and Common Council from 7 to 13 March 1848 marked the climax of his unsuccessful bid for the Whig presidential nomination. Despite the fact that Clay's visit conflicted with funeral services for John Quincy Adams, the Kentuckian received a tumultuous public welcome, which, according to some reports, surpassed any previous reception given a private citizen. The incident Douglass mentions occurred at a public reception for Clay at City Hall on 10 March. After three hours of shaking hands with a seemingly endless line of admirers, the exhausted Clay called a halt to the proceedings and appeared on a balcony to greet the thousands still waiting outside. Clay told the crowd “he had come . . . with the expectation of shaking all his friends by the hand " and “as he had given all that were in the inside of the building his hand, he now gave all on the outside his heart! " George Rawlings Poage, Henry Clay and the Whig Party (Chapel Hill, 1936), 170; Calvin Colton, The Last Seven Years of the Life of Henry Clay (New York, 1856), 83-87; Epes Sargent, The Life and Public Services of Henry Clay (New York, 1848), 114-18. (With great humor.) And I want
to say to our white friends that we colored folks have had the subject under
careful consideration, and have decided to stay! (Great laughter.) I want to
say to any colonization friends here, that they may give their minds no
further uneasiness on our account, for our minds are made up. (Laughter) I
think this is about the best argument on that subject.
Now there is one thing more about us colored folks: it is this, that under
all these most adverse circumstances, we live, and move and have our
being, and that too in peace (laughter), and we are almost persuaded that
there is a providence in our staying here. I do not know but the United
States would rot in its tyranny if there were not some negroes in this
land—some to clink their chains in the ear of listening humanity, and from
whose prostrate forms the lessons of liberty can be taught to the whites.
(Applause) It is through us now that you are learning that your own rights
are stricken down. At this time it is the abolitionist that holds up the lamp
that shows the political parties of the north their fetters and chains. A little
while ago, and the northern men were bound in the strange fanatic delusion
that they had something to do with making of Presidents of the U[nited]
States: that is about given up now. No one now of common sense, or
common reading, imagines for a moment that New York has anything to do
with deciding who the President shall be. They are allowed to vote, but
what is the amount of this privilege? It is to vote for the slaveholder, or
whom the slaveholders select. No men that are now accounted sane think of
any other than of a slaveholder or assassin, or both, who shall hold the
destinies of the nation (laughter)—and the reason is because the people are
convinced that they belong—as they used to say—to the colored boys of the
south, to the party.8At the time Douglass spoke, Mexican War generals Winfield Scott and Zachary Taylor appeared to be the most likely presidential nominees of the Democratic and Whig panics, respectively. The Democrats ultimately chose Lewis Cass, but the nomination of the southern-born Taylor by the Whigs was one of several factors leading to antislavery defections from that party to the newly formed Free Soil party. Douglass gives a fuller statement of his views on southern influence in national politics in his editorial “The North and the Presidency," NS, 17 March 1848. They used sometimes to ask me, “Boy, who do you
belong to?” and I used to answer, “To Captain Thomas Auld, of St.
Michael ’s, a classleader in the Methodist Episcopal Church;” and now,
I would ask, “Who do you belong to?” (Laughter) I will tell you. You
belong to the Democratic party, to the Whig party, and these parties belong
to the slaveholder, and the slaveholder rules the country. As the boy said
about ruling England—“I rule mamma, and mamma rules papa, and
papa rules the people, and the people rule England.” To be sure you have
the right to vote, which is like what I once heard of a certain boy, who said
he was going to live with his Uncle Robert, and when I go there, said he, I
am going to do just as I please—if uncle Robert will let me! The Northern
people are going to do just as they please—if the slaveholders will let them!
The little bit of opposition that has manifested itself in that little protuber-
ance on American politics—the Wilmot Proviso—which our friend Gay
has fully described as a tempest in a teapot, has now quite flattened down.
The Whigs, who said, We will stand by it at all hazards, have fairly backed
out; they got afraid of the Union. In Ohio, I heard men, striking their fists
together, saying they would stand by it at all hazards; and after a little while
the Ohio State Legislature came to the conclusion, after having carefully
considered the matter, that “to press the question of no more slave terri-
tory, must be disastrous to our American Union.” New York came out
expressly in favor of the Proviso, and it has since seen that the Union will be
periled by adherence to that principle.9In January 1848 the New York legislature reaffirmed its support of the Wilmot Proviso, as did the Ohio General Assembly in three separate resolutions passed the following month. There is no indication that the Ohio actions were reversed. Douglass possibly refers to a September 1847 speech in Carthage, Ohio, by Thomas Corwin, the state's Whig senator and a presidential aspirant. On that occasion Corwin alienated his antislavery supporters by deploring abolitionism as a threat to national unity and by describing the Wilmot Proviso as a “dangerous issue." New York State Legislature, Laws. . . Passed at the Seventy-First Session of the Legislature (Albany, 1848), 578; Ohio General Assembly, Acts of a Local Nature, Passed by the Forty-Sixth General Assembly. . . (Columbus, 1848), 299-301, 314; Holt, “Party Politics in Ohio," 156-57; Norman A. Graebner, “Thomas Corwin and the Election of 1848: A Study in Conservative Politics," JSH, 17: 162-79 (May 1951). And all over the North there is this
fainting away before that power which was before undefined, as has been
so eloquently touched upon by my friend Phillips. For while men hold up
their hands in favor of the Union and the Constitution, there is a moral
conflict in their hearts; for, as was so beautifully expressed by Mr.
Parker,10Theodore Parker (1810-60), Harvard-educated Unitarian clergyman and reformer, was among the most erudite of all New England transcendentalists. Born in Lexington, Massachusetts, he taught at Boston-area private schools from 1831 until 1842 and graduated from Harvard Divinity School in 1836. After his ordination in 1837, Parker preached mainly at his West Roxbury church until 1845, when he resigned and accepted the pastorate of the new Twenty-Eighth Congregational Society of Boston. There he attracted a large, socially diverse and racially integrated following. The author of numerous tracts, sermons, and published addresses, he also edited the Massachusetts Quarterly Review throughout its three-year existence. Although he criticized some Garrisonian positions, Parker joined actively in the antislavery cause after 1845, attacking slavery on moral and economic grounds but basing his most militant abolitionism on the belief that black emancipation would prepare the way for further Anglo-Saxon dominance. As a member of the Boston Vigilance Committee he gave frequent aid to escaped bondsmen, actively resisted the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, and was indicted for his role in the Anthony Burns case. An outspoken proponent ofthe admission of Kansas as a free state, Parker hosted a meeting in 1858 at which John Brown disclosed his plans for a raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia. In early 1859 Parker embarked for Europe to recuperate from tuberculosis. He died of the disease and was buried in Florence, Italy. Henry Steele Commager, Theodore Parker (Boston, 1960), 197-247; George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind (New York, 1971), 119-21, 157-58; ACAB, 4: 654—56; DAB, 14: 238-41. of Boston, men cannot fight slavery under the Constitution: the
Constitution soils the armor about them. We cannot strike slavery while we
have it on us. There is no other way but to throw it off.11Wendell Phillips and Theodore Parker both addressed the meeting prior to Douglass, but their speeches were not reported in detail. Phillips spoke for an hour and a half on the general theme that the “political strength of slavery is much greater now than it was at any previous time in the United States." Parker, in an address distinguished less by “declamatory power" than by “earnest thoughts and beautiful imagery," drew an extended analogy between individual sin and national morality. “It sometimes happens," he argued, “that man contains in his bosom one cherished sin, sometimes resolving to cast it out, and to pursue an ideal virtue, and sometimes inclined to follow it, and although not generally known in consequence of this sin he becomes less and less respectable. If he decides in favor of the real virtue, he comes into unity with himself and with God. The United States presented an illustration ofthis kind. Slavery was a great contradiction to the declaration of our fathers and the genius of the government which they sought to set up." New York Herald, 10 May 1848; New York Daily Tribune, 10 May 1848.
I have no prepared speech, and I will not weary you any longer. I have
sometimes thought since the late occurrence in France, there may be an
undercurrent in men’s hearts here as there was in Paris; Louis Philippe
thought himself perfectly secure surrounded by his 300,000 soldiers, who,
with fixed bayonets, were ready to support him in the suppression of the
riots. But the troops were found to fraternize with the people; the soldier
joined the civilian to assert and defend his rights. So I believe here, after all
we have said against the American people, there is yet an undercurrent
pervading the mass of this country, uniting Democrat and Whig, and men
of no party, taking hold in quarters we know not of, which shall one day rise
up in one glorious fraternity for freedom, uniting into one mighty phalanx
of freemen to bring down the haughty citadel of slavery with all its blood
towers and turrets.
“There’s a good time coming, boys,
A good time coming,
Wait a little longer.
We may not live to see the day,
But earth shall glisten in the ray
Of the good time coming;
Cannon balls may aid the truth,
But thought’s a weapon stronger,
We’ll win the battle by its aid,
Wait a little longer."¹12Douglass quotes the first verse of Charles Mackay's “The Good Time Coming." Mackay, Voices from the Mountains, 202.