Too Much Religion, Too Little Humanity: An Address Delivered in New York, New York, on May 9, 1849
TOO MUCH RELIGION, TOO LITTLE HUMANITY: AN ADDRESS
DELIVERED IN NEW YORK, NEW YORK, ON 9 MAY 1849
National Anti-Slavery Standard, 24 May 1849. Other texts in Liberator, 18 May 1849;
North Star, 1 June 1849; Foner, Life and Writings, 5: 126-35.
The evening session of the American Anti-Slavery Society met on 9 May 1849
in the basement auditorium of Hope Chapel, located at 718 Broadway in New
York City. In a description of the occasion for the North Star, William Nell
said that Hope Chapel was “up Broadway in a neighborhood of the aristoc-
racy, who were represented in good numbers.” Nonabolitionists and non-
Garrisonians also attended—occasionally demonstrating their presence in
vehemently negative reactions to the featured speakers’ remarks. Garrison
chaired the meeting, and after Samuel J. May read the resolutions before the
Society, he delivered a speech on the challenges facing abolitionists in their
work of reform. Neither the nation nor her churches had lived up to high
principles, he argued, so that the abolitionist task was a “mighty work.” “We
are doing the work and the will of God,” Garrison proclaimed. After Doug-
lass’s speech, one Mr. Atwill, a resident of New York who had traveled in the
South, took the platform and remarked that the meeting resembled an “anti-
church society” more than an antislavery society. He reported that while
being in Georgia he had been permitted to teach slaves to read the Bible and
that he therefore had little patience with “those gentlemen who come forward
and spend almost their whole Anniversary in vituperations upon the church. ”
Although Atwill was accorded a respectful hearing, Wendell Phillips, in his
concluding address, denied that a “traveller’s acquaintance” with slavery
was as credible as “the knowledge which has been gained by a slave-born man
through years of suffering. ” NS, 18, 25 May 1849; NASS, 17 May 1849.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS.—Mr. Chairman—I think we, as Abolitionists, are
apt to overrate the intelligence of our audiences with respect to their knowl-
edge of Slavery, and also with respect to their knowledge of the guilt of the
churches. I think there are few people out of the ranks of the Abolitionists,
who really know anything of the real position of the American Church in
regard to Slavery. We meet in this city from year to year and denounce the
pro-slavery position of the American Church and Clergy, but we seldom
have time to lay before our meetings any facts connected with the proceed-
ings of the Churches in regard to Slavery. I propose in the few remarks that
I shall make this evening to say a word with respect to this sort of evidence,
and to give a few facts which are familiar enough to the Abolitionist, but
which are quite unknown, I have reason to believe, even to the very church
members themselves. The ministers know what action they have taken on
the subject of Slavery, but the people know very little about it.
Take for instance, the Methodist Episcopal Church. That Church prob-
ably wields an influence in this country second to no other in the land. In the
year 1836, when the question of Slavery was rocking this country from
centre to circumference and when the lives of Abolitionists were scarcely
safe at times from the fury of the mobs that were howling round their
persons and their houses, this subject came up before the General Confer-
ence of the Methodist Episcopal Church. It seems that two ministers of that
denomination ventured to lecture upon, and in favour of emancipation in
the city of Cincinnati.1The 1836 General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church met in Cincinnati and the two ministers to whom Douglass refers were Samuel Norris and George Storrs. The very next day after these lectures were given,
the Rev. Stephen G. Roszell,2A Virginian by birth, Stephen G. Roszel (1770-1841) became a Methodist Episcopal itinerant minister in 1789 and at various times worked a circuit that encompassed parts of Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. After 1807 Roszel spent a proportionately larger amount of his time in and around the Baltimore area. As a result of his influence and vigilance, the Baltimore Conference attempted to reduce the number of slaveholding ministers within its jurisdiction by insisting that candidates for ordination exhaust “all legal means” of disposing of any slaves that they possessed. In 1828 Roszel, along with Peter Cartwright, offered a resolution at the General Conference that would have allowed the Church to chastise masters who abused their slaves. Later, in 1832, he convinced the General Conference to establish a committee on slavery and was instrumental in preventing the election of a slaveholding bishop. Though espousing an antislavery position, Roszel also feared disruption of the Church and, at the 1836 General Conference, offered the two resolutions that Douglass quotes in substance. Donald G. Mathews, Slavery and Methodism: A Chapter in American Morality, 1780-1845 (Princeton, 1965), 35-37, 52-53, 115-16, 141; William B. Sprague, ed., Annals of the American Pulpit; or, Commemorative Notices of Distinguished Clergymen of Various Denominations, 9 vols. (New York, 1859-73), 7: 179-81; Simpson, Cyclopaedia of Methodism, 768; James G. Birney, The American Churches the Bulwarks of American Slavery (1842; Concord, NH, 1885), 15-16. a distinguished minister in that Church,
brought forward two or three distinct resolutions setting forth the views of
the General Conference with respect to Slavery. What were these views?
They declared in their first resolution, in Annual Conference assembled,
“that they were wholly opposed to modern Abolitionism, and that they
wholly disapproved of the conduct of the two ministers who were reported
to have lectured upon and in favour of this agitated topic.” They went
further; and in another resolution declared, “that they were not only wholly
opposed to modern Abolitionists, but they had no right, no wish, no
intention to interfere with the relations existing between masters and slaves
in the Southern States of our Union.” These resolutions were adopted by
that large conference, with only eleven voting against them.3The General Conference passed the first resolution to which Douglass refers by a vote of 122 to 11 and the second by a vote of 120 to 14. Birney, American Churches, 16. An over-
whelming concourse of divines professing to be called of God to preach the
Gospel, to proclaim deliverance to the captive and the opening of the prison
doors to those that were bound, declared before the world that they had “no
right, no wish, no intention to interfere with the relations of masters and
slaves.” The slaveholders rejoiced in that action. They could smoke their
pipes in comfort when they got a knowledge of the proceedings of that body
of divines. They could hear of revivals of religion going on in the Church
with the utmost complacency. They felt in no wise alarmed but rather
strengthened by the members that were added to that Church, for that
Church so far from being an abolition Church, had “no right, no wish, no
intention to interfere with the relation of master and slave.” That is the
religion for me, said the slaveholder. There sat the bondman before that
body of Methodist divines in his chains calling upon them in the name of
God and of humanity to give him his freedom and deliver him from his
bonds. Deliver me from my chains! was the cry that came up from the lips
of three millions of bondmen, and yet these Methodist clergymen re-
sponded, “We have no right, no wish, no intention to give you freedom.”
How is it with the Presbyterian Christian? You know that a few years
ago, through the agency of the Abolitionists in New England, a large
number of petitions and memorials were sent to the General Assembly of
the Presbyterian Church, calling upon that body to pass resolutions declar-
ing Slavery to be only a moral evil. They stated that that body had already
denounced dancing, declaring it to be incompatible with church member-
ship to move the feet at the sound of music, and they believed that their
consciences were now becoming alive at least to something more than the
sin of dancing. They were encouraged therefore to send petitions asking
these divines merely to consider Slavery to be a moral evil. So the General
Assembly passed this resolution in answer to their memorials:
“Resolved, that it is inexpedient and not for the edification of the
Church to pass any judgment in respect to Slavery.”4In 1840, 1843, and 1846 the Presbyterian (New School) General Assembly accepted and read memorials on the subject of slavery. The Assembly passed a resolution against dancing in 1843. The 1840 Assembly adopted a resolution stating that it was inexpedient for the Church to take a stand on slavery. Birney, American Churches, 37.
It is the boast of the Protestant Episcopal Church of this country that it
never has anything to do with such sins as Slavery. It is their boast that their
Church has not been distracted or disturbed by this agitating topic. To be
sure it has had some other topics that have agitated the public mind to some
extent, which I need not mention here. If I were in a Moral Reform meeting
I might speak of them. (Laughter.) But as to the question of American
Slavery, it is their boast that they are not disturbed by it. The groans of
heart-broken millions come up on every breeze, but they do not hear them,
they are indifferent about them: “We are worshipping the Lord,” say they,
“we are engaged in giving honours to God; that is our business.”
Now I have taken these three Christian Churches and they are for
samples of the rest. The Baptists are no better than the Methodists and
Presbyterians, and the Episcopalians are as bad as either. They are all as
pro-slavery as they well can be. It is because these churches have passed
resolutions favouring Slavery, and have in other cases resolved to have
nothing to do with the matter, that we are compelled to attack them if we
would be faithful to [Anti-]Slavery. And if there is one thing that leads me
to identify myself with the American Anti-Slavery Society, more than
another, it is their readiness at all times and in all circumstances to apply the
highest and the most radical Anti-Slavery tests to all parties, all institu-
tions, and all organizations of the land. [I have been into various] Anti-
Slavery meetings since I came to this city, and I have heard speeches on
various branches of the Anti-Slavery topic; but the most earnest, the most
sincere, the most radical tone of sentiment from any quarter has been from
the platform of the old fashioned Garrisonian Abolitionists. (Applause) I
mention this for the benefit of some I see before me who attended these
other meetings, and who think that because everything went on orderly at
them it indicates great progress.
Why, the other day I went into the meeting of the American and
Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, and after a long abstract of the report was
read and my soul was fired up with the expectation of hearing Slavery
denounced and its supporters held up to the detestation of all those who
loved the slave, while I was waiting to get my spiritual strength renewed, a
grave gentleman arose and said “The next thing in order will be music."5On 8 May 1849, at the ninth annual meeting of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, Lewis Tappan, the corresponding secretary, read an abstract of the Annual Report. The Luca family, a group of four young black musicians, then performed an antislavery hymn, the “Car of Emancipation." American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, Annual Report. . . 1849 (New York, 1849), 6.
(Laughter.) Now Anti-Slavery meetings, according to my notion, should
not be very orderly. I like the wild disorder of our free-discussion meetings.
I like to hear the earnest voice of Anti-Slavery, so far forgetting the charac-
ter of its speech, and manner of its delivery, that almost any person may be
able to take exceptions to the remarks made. I always feel glad when I have
a thousand explanations to make after I go away from Anti-Slavery meet-
ings. When I have spoken in such a way as to lead the people to think that I
am a despiser of religion, or that I hate the very name of a clergyman, or
that I am myself an Infidel, then I feel that I have done something towards
leading the people to think of their responsibility in regard to Slavery.
I believe the grand reason why we have Slavery in this land at the
present moment is that we are too religious as a nation, in other words, that
we have substituted religion for humanity—we have substituted a form of
Godliness, an outside show for the real thing itself. We have houses built
for the worship of God, which are regarded as too sacred to plead the cause
of the down-trodden millions in them. They will tell you in these churches
that they are willing to receive you to talk to them about the sins of the
Scribes and Pharisees, or on the subject of the heathenism of the South Sea
Islands, or on any of the subjects connected with missions, the Tract
Society, the Bible Society,6The American Tract Society, a religious publishing society founded in 1825, and the American Bible Society, organized in 1816 for the purpose of distributing free Bibles, were interdenominational organizations. Both societies were hostile to the antislavery movement: the American Bible Society consistently displayed a reluctance to issue Bibles to slaves, and the American Tract Society never published a pamphlet or book that attacked slavery. Tyler, Freedom's Ferment, 32, 267, 297, 314, 324, 335; Clifford S. Griffin, Their Brothers’ Keepers: Moral Stewardship in the United States, 1800-1865 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1960), 46-48, 65-66, 81-83, 177-82, 191-97. and other Societies connected with the Church,
but the very moment you ask them to open their mouths for the liberation of
the Southern slaves, they tell you, that is a subject with which they have
nothing to do, and which they do not wish to have introduced into the
Church; it is foreign to the object for which churches in this country were
formed, and houses built.
The American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society seems to have fallen
into the error of supposing that the distribution of the Bible among the
slaves will be the means of their ultimate liberation. I should not wonder, if
the slaves could be allowed to make known to that Society [their] view of
[its] efforts to give them liberty, if they should say “First give us ourselves
and then we will get Bibles. ” What the slave begs for is his freedom and the
American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society comes forward and says
“Here is a Bible. ” To be sure, they say they would be glad to have the slave
free, but I ask any of you who were present in their meeting yesterday and
heard the speech made by Mr. Henry Bibb7Henry Bibb (1815-54), born a slave in Shelby County, Kentucky, escaped in 1837, only to be recaptured in his unsuccessful attempt to rescue his wife, Malinda, and their child, Mary Frances. By 1842, he had escaped once again and had settled in Detroit, Michigan, his residence until 1850. Immediately plunging into political and antislavery work, Bibb attended the black state convention in 1843, lectured in Michigan and Ohio in 1844, was hired as a lecturer by the Michigan Anti-Slavery Society the following year, and spoke on behalf of Liberty party candidates. In the fall and winter of 1846 he toured New England and, in May 1847, attended the Boston reception to welcome Douglass back from his English tour. Bibb made an extensive tour of Maine, attended the Free Soil convention in Buffalo, New York, and was elected as a delegate to the Cleveland National Convention of Colored Citizens in 1848. Though Bibb planned to visit England in l848, at the invitation of abolitionists in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, he was advised against making such a tour because the bigamous implications of his marriage to a free woman. Mary E. Miles, might limit his antislavery appeal. He toured the East in 1849, at one point acting as an agent for the North Star, and published his Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb. . . (New York, 1849). While in Michigan, he worked as an agent for the Raisin Institute, a manual-labor school for blacks, and, apparently, was a member of a black secret society engaged in illegal antislavery work. Bibb's interest in Canadian colonization seems to date from the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. In November 1850 in Sandwich, Canada West, he acted as the recording secretary of the Benevolent Association, a land-purchasing organization. In Windsor, Bibb founded the Voice of the Fugitive (1851-53). He was associated with the North American Colored Convention, which met in Toronto in 1851 to discuss the formation of an international race organization. In January 1852, a Detroit-based land-buying society merged with the earlier Benevolent Association to form the Refugee Home Society, of which Bibb was an officer and trustee and his wife was corresponding secretary. Bibb was also active in the Anti-Slavery Society of Canada, serving as one of its vice presidents in 1852. At the annual meeting of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society on 8 May 1849, Douglass had heard a portion of Bibb's speech in support of a resolution recommending the distribution of Bibles to slaves. NS, 24 March 1848, 12, 19 January, 16 February, 18 May, 15, 22 June 1849; FDP, 11 August 1854; Lib., 1 June 1849; BFASR, ser. 3, 2: 248 (1 November 1854); Henry Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, in Gilbert Osofsky, ed., Puttin' On Ole Massa (New York, 1969), 64, 74-82, 154-64; American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, Annual Report, 1849, 6-10; Proceedings of the National Emigration Convention of Colored People; Held at Cleveland, Ohio... August, 1854 (Pittsburgh, Pa., 1854), 10, 19; Patrick C. Kennicott, “Negro Antislavery Speakers in America” (PhD. diss., Florida State University, 1967), 172-75; Fred Landon, “Henry Bibb, A Colonizer," JNH, 5: 437-47 (October 1920); William H. Pease and Jane H. Pease, Black Utopia: Negro Communal Experiments in America (Madison, Wise, 1963), 109-22; Robin W. Winks, The Blacks in Canada: A History (New Haven, 1972), 204-08, 254-55, 396-97; Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 61-62, 185, 218-19; Miller, Search for a Black Nationality, 106-07, 110-15, 149; Quarles, FD, 57; Pease and Pease, They Who Would Be Free, 65, 252-53; Sewell, Ballots for Freedom, 160; David M. Katzman, Before the Ghetto: Black Detroit in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana, Ill., 1973), 14-16, 39, 41-42. if the chief design of that
Society did not seem to be, to give the slave the Bible, which when it is
given him he cannot read. For my part I am not for giving the slave the
Bible or anything else this side of his freedom. Give him that first and then
you need not give him anything else. He can get what he needs.
(Applause.) I know that the inference was left in the minds of some who
attended that meeting that the Old Organization were not in favour of
giving the Bible to the slaves, for the [American and Foreign Anti-Slavery]
Society arrogated to itself a great amount of piety in that it was in favour of
giving the Bible to the slave, and it was said by their speaker, I believe, that
if the Old Abolitionists had gone to work and tried to distribute the Bible
among the slaves, ere this, Slavery would have been abolished.8Bibb had stated: “If. . . the Bible had been placed in the hands or within reach of the poor, defenseless and unhappy slave, we need not be here on this occasion, to advocate the rights and liberties of one-sixth of the people of this country. . . . He had often wished that all his Anti-Slavery friends had stuck to the Bible, that they had all pressed its commands and precepts upon slaveholders. Had they done so, he believed there would not have been any occasion for our meeting to-day." American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, Annual Report, 1849, 8. Now what
we want is first to give the slave himself. It is but another attempt to mend
old garments with new cloth—to put new wine into old bottles, to think of
giving the slave the Bible without first giving him himself. God did not say
to Moses “Tell my people to serve me that they may go free,” but “Go and
tell Pharoah to let my people go that they may serve me."9A paraphrase of either Exod. 7: 16; 8: 1, 20: 9: 1, 13; or 10: 3. (Great
applause.) The first thing is freedom. It is the all important thing. There can
be no virtue without freedom—there can be no obedience to the Bible
without freedom. When the slave is free he can own a Bible; but suppose
we carry it to him now, what is the law of Slavery? It is that the slave shall
be taken, deemed, reputed, and judged in law to be property to all intents
and purposes whatsoever. Now how can property own property—how can
property own the Bible? It takes persons to own property, but the personal-
ity of the slave is annihilated. He is not looked upon or treated in any way as
a person except when he is to be punished.
I throw out these remarks because I think there is danger of confound-
ing our Anti-Slavery duties with what are not our Anti-Slavery duties.
There is an attempt on the part of some professedly Anti-Slavery advocates
to make themselves out as the religious advocates of Anti-Slavery and all
others as irreligious advocates of the cause.
MR. FOSTER10Born in Canterbury, New Hampshire, to devout Congregationalist parents, radical abolitionist Stephen Symonds Foster (1809-81) studied at Dartmouth College and while there, acting on his pacifist convictions, was jailed for refusing to perform military service. In 1837, a year before his graduation, he helped to organize the New Hampshire Young Men's Anti-Slavery Society. Foster briefly attended Union Theological Seminary in New York. By 1839 he had repudiated the ministry and during the early forties, had embarked upon what would prove to be a highly controversial campaign to bring the antislavery message into northern churches. He developed his criticisms of American churches most fully in The Brotherhood of Thieves; or, A True Picture of the American Church and Clergy. His practice of interrupting a church service to speak out against the churches’ complicity with slavery frequently provoked violent reaction. Parker Pillsbury suspected that Foster probably “encountered more mob opposition and violence than any other agent ever in the anti-slavery lecturing field." Though Foster was an agent for antislavery societies for nearly twenty years, his relationship with them, especially the American Anti-Slavery Society, was at best one of strained cooperation. By 1859 Foster and his wife Abby Kelley, whom he had married in 1845, were estranged from the leadership of the American Anti-Slavery Society for, among other reasons, his insistent declarations that the Society had lost its effectiveness. Although Foster believed that the Constitution was a proslavery document, he periodically dabbled in politics. In 1843-44 he endorsed the Liberty party; in 1845 he favored voting for men who, if elected, would refuse to serve because they thought the Constitution supported slavery. By the late 1850s, having altered his view of the nature of the Constitution,. Foster sought to establish a disunion party “whose avowed aim. . . [would] be the overthrow of the government. . . & whose will . . . [would] be expressed through the ballot box." A charter member of the Non-Resistant Society, Foster's commitment to pacifism was less ambivalent. By the mid-1850s, however, he was to argue in favor of slave rebellion in his Revolution the Only Remedy for Slavery (New York, 1855) and subsequently, in 1863, to declare that he would “go down to Carolina and face the rebel armies; with the sword of the spirit, however, and not with the sword of steel." A proponent of distributing land to the freedmen, Foster was disappointed with federal Reconstruction policies. He devoted the last years of his life to temperance and women's-rights work. Parker Pillsbury, Acts of the Anti-Slavery Apostles (Concord, N.H. , 1883), 123-55; Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease, Bound With Them in Chains: A Biographical History of the Antislavery Movement (Westport, Conn., 1972), 191-217; James Otis Lyford, History of the Town of Canterbury, New Hampshire, 1727-1912, 2 vols. (Concord, N.H., 1912), 2: 140-41; Jane H. Pease, “The Freshness of Fanaticism: Abby Kelley Foster: An Essay in Reform" (Ph.D. diss., University of Rochester, 1969), 65-84, 118-21, 125-26, 133-34, 143-44, 161-65, 184-87, 195-205, 217-18, 237-44; Lillie B. Chace Wyman, “Reminiscences of Two Abolitionists," New England Magazine, n.s. 27: 536-50 (January 1903); Nation, 33: 21-17 (15 September 1881); Louis Filler, “Parker Pillsbury: An Anti-Slavery Apostle," New England Quarterly, 19: 315-37 (September 1946); Boston Daily Advertiser, 9, 10 September 1881; Charles R. Gillett, comp., Alumni Catalogue of the Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York, 1836-1926 (New York, 1926), 13; Parker Pillsbury, “Stephen Symonds Foster," Granite Monthly, 5: 369-75 (August, 1882); NCAB, 2: 328-29; ACAB, 2: 514-15; DAB, 6: 558-59. (interposing).—I should like to know if Henry Bibb and
the rest of the men concerned in that movement, professedly to give the
Bible to the slave, are not, all of them without exception, fully aware of the
fact that they cannot give the Bible to the slave and that no matter how much
money they may collect for that purpose they dare not and do not mean to
do so? I ask therefore if it is not a deceptive mo[ve]ment, intended to
misguide and beguile the people of the North who are beginning to be
aroused to a sense of their duty of doing something for the slave?
MR. DOUGLASS.—I am inclined to think that a good many who are
connected with the movement have been really blinded into the belief that
in one or two slave States they can give the Bible.
MR. FOSTER—Are they the slaveholders?
MR. DOUGLASS.—Mr. Bibb thinks it can be done in Kentucky.
MR. FOSTER—Does he not know that they are not allowed to do it?
MR. DOUGLASS.—There is a class of men who seem to believe if a man
should fall overboard into the sea with a Bible in his pocket it would be
hardly possible for him to drown. Mr. Bibb told me in conversation, that he
believed if the slave had the Bible, the Lord would help him to read it.
(Laughter.) Well, if he has worked himself up into that belief, let us give
him the credit for his sincerity, and battle with the belief itself.
A STRANGER—(from the back part of the house). Mr. Bibb stated that
there were no legal impediments in several of the States.
MR. DOUGLASS.—And what is more remarkable, he stated that on
every plantation at the South where there were any considerable number of
slaves, there were always one or more among them who could read. I do not
know how he could make such a statement. I am from the State of Mary-
land, where slaves are as highly favoured as in any State in the Union, and I
believe more so, because it is one of the more northerly States, and peopled
by persons from the North, and yet I must tell you that in a neighbourhood
where there were no fewer than 5,000 slaves in a distance of twelve miles
around from where I lived, I never met more than two out of the whole
number who could read. And yet Mr. Bibb states to his audience as a sort
of plaster to their consciences—as a sort of moral chloroform, as Mr.
Pillsbury11Parker Pillsbury (1809-98), outspoken abolitionist orator. editor, and author, was born in Hamilton, Massachusetts, but later moved to Henniker, New Hampshire, where he farmed and worked as a wagoner until 1835. The local Congregational church accepted him as a member in 1833 and, observing his interest in theology and temperance, the church elders soon “marked out " Pillsbury for a career in the ministry. Pillsbury graduated from New Hampshire’s Gilmanton Theological Seminary in 1838 and studied an additional year at Andover before accepting a church in Loudon, New Hampshire. Converted to abolitionism by a traveling Quaker teacher and by his association with John A. Collins at Andover, Pillsbury incurred the displeasure of his congregation with sharp attacks on the churches' complicity with slavery. After his license to preach was revoked in 1840, he became lecturing agent for the New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and American antislavery societies, posts he held for over two decades. He edited the Concord (N.H.) Herald of Freedom in 1840 and again in 1845 and 1846 and the National Anti-Slavery Standard in 1866. In 1854 he served as an emissary from the American Anti-Slavery Society to Great Britain. Pillsbury was a loyal Garrisonian and sometimes even more demanding than Garrison himself regarding the necessity for purifying abolitionism of all tendencies toward compromise and expediency. He lectured widely, often in the company of Stephen S. Foster, and earned a reputation for his successful use of nonresistance in dealing with hostile crowds. Although he served on the executive committee of the New Hampshire Non-Resistance Society, he was among the strongest defenders of John Brown after the Harpers Ferry raid. During the Civil War, Pillsbury criticized Union war aims, especially before the Emancipation Proclamation, and in 1865 broke with Garrison over the necessity for continued activity by the American Anti-Slavery Society. He helped to draft the constitution of the feminist American Equal Rights Association in 1865, served as vice-president of the New Hampshire Woman Suffrage Association, and, in 1868 and 1869, edited a weekly, Revolution, with Elizabeth Cady Stanton. He was also active in the ecumenical Free Religious Association and preached to its societies in New York, Ohio, and Michigan. Pillsbury completed his abolition memoirs, Acts of the Anti-Slavery Apostles. in 1883. Filler, “Parker Pillsbury"; Mabee, Black Freedom, 112, 221-23, 329; James M. McPherson, The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Princeton, 1964), 59-60, 100-02, 305-07; DAB, 14: 608-09. would say, to the consciences of those who are just opening
their eyes and who are alarmed by our rebukes, that there are one or more
on every plantation who can read. I do not believe in the statement. I know
from my own experience that not more than perhaps one in five thousand
can read in the State of Maryland.
MR. FOSTER—NOW to test the honesty and integrity of those men, I
will state here publicly, and any gentleman present may carry the intelli-
gence to the leaders of that party, that to save them the trouble of raising
funds, I will furnish them with ONE THOUSAND BIBLES, if Bibb or any
other prominent man among them will go, openly and in person, and carry
them to the slaves. I will have nothing to do with any underhanded move-
ment to steal Bibles into the South. Thieving is bad enough when con-
nected with getting property, but when it is connected with the glory of God
it is utterly detestable, and I will have nothing to do with it. And I think I
can do more; I think I can pledge that individual one thousand more after he
has distributed the first thousand; but I will keep within my means. Let
them spare themselves the trouble to go through this city to collect funds for
that purpose, for I am ready to fulfil my pledge. (Applause)
STRANGER.—There is a missionary in Kentucky distributing Bibles,12In 1848 the American Missionary Association, an offshoot of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, began soliciting for its “Slaves' Bible Fund." The American Missionary Association's agent in this project, to whom the STRANGER refers, was the Reverend John G. Fee of Lewis County, Kentucky. Although a frequent victim of white mobs, Fee continued his distribution of Bibles to the slaves and related antislavery religious endeavors until driven from Kentucky in 1859. American Missionary, 2: 37 (March 1848), 2: 47 (April 1848); The Liberty Almanac for 1849 (New York., 1848), 38; American Missionary Association, Third Annual Report (New York, 1848), 8; Griffin, Their Brothers' Keepers, 180-82; McKivigan, “Abolitionism and the American Churches," 285-86, 292-96.
and if you will present your account tomorrow, the Bibles will be taken.
(Applause)
MR. FOSTER—Will the gentleman repeat this statement? I did not hear
it, but from the manner in which it was received, I think it must be interest-
mg.
STRANGER.—Call at 61 John street,13The address of offices shared by the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society and the American Missionary Association. and your proposition will be
faithfully received.
MR. FOSTER.—I did not agree to call anywhere. I am here to be called
upon. (Applause) [I will be in] this city to-morrow, and after that I shall be at
my residence in Worcester, Mass. I shall be happy to be called upon by any
of those gentlemen who are ready to go forward and distribute the Bibles. I
do not want to be referred to some impossible shadow at 61 John street,
merely for the sake of doing away with the effect of my proposition. Does
the gentleman say that he is the man who will take the Bibles to the South?
STRANGER.—If you will give me your address, you will be called upon
to-morrow.
MR. FOSTER—My address is the Anti-Slavery meeting to-morrow,
and after that Stephen S. Foster, Worcester, Mass. (Applause) Since the
gentleman has taken the liberty to ask me my address, of course he will
return the favour by giving me and this audience his own address. I want
this audience to know who it is that backs out of their position, the Old
Organization or the New.
STRANGER.—My name is James S. Warren,14Actually James S. Warner, a Williamsburg, New York, businessman who was a longtime member of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society’s executive committee (1846-55). Earlier this same day, Warner had chaired the annual business meeting of the “New Organization" just a few blocks from the Garrisonians’ gathering place. A mainstay in New York antislavery activities, Warner later served along with Douglass as an officer of the American Abolition Society,. the group professing belief in the unconstitutionalism of slavery. AFASR, 3: 8 (May 1846); Radical Abolitionist, October, 1858; American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, Annual Report, 1849, 17; John Doggett. Jr., comp, Doggett’s New York City Directory, Illustrated (New York, 1848), “Appendix,” 13. 9 University Place.
MR. FOSTER.—Mr. James S. Warren may call for his Bibles to-
morrow.
MR. DOUGLASS.—I shall be pleased to ask the gentleman a question.
Can the gentleman inform me whether it is the intention of the American
and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society to get the consent of the slaveholders
before giving the slaves the Bible?
MR. WARREN.—The object of the Society is to distribute the Bible
among the slaves whether with or without the consent of the slaveholder.
MR. DOUGLASS.—They do not avow their public declarations that they
are going to give the Bible with or without the consent of the slaveholders.
MR. FOSTER—I wish, Mr. Chairman, to call the attention of the report-
ers to that statement of one of the friends of the American and Foreign
Anti-Slavery Society, for I want it to go to the world that that Society,
avows it through one of its leading members (for I take it that the gentleman
would not have pledged the Society if he were not one of its leading
members), that the Society avows it as its intention to put the Bible into the
hands of the slaves with or without the consent of the masters. If the master
does not consent, of course, the design is to go there with force and arms to
do it. I wish this declaration of one of the prominent members of that
Society who feels himself authorized to speak in its behalf, to go forth to the
world.
MR. Doucmss—I wish to make a single remark further about giving
the Bible to the slaves. Here are three or four facts connected with the
matter which make the thing impossible. In the first place the slaveholder’s
consent must be obtained before any Bibles can be given to the slaves, and
the slaveholder will never give his consent to let the slave have anything
which may open his mind to the wrong of holding him as his property. lf his
consent is had at all, it is purchased at the expense of the silence of the
person giving the Bible to his slave, as to its being presented for the purpose
of opening his mind to the sin of Slavery.
In the next place, if the Bible is given to the slave he cannot read it. So it
is absolutely not giving it at all; for you might as well give him a block with
no letters upon it as the Bible with letters in it; because he cannot read it.
Now if this Society would only ask for money to educate the slaves whether
the masters would or not, and some good volunteer like my friend in the
distance should go there professing that his object is to educate the slave
whether with or without the consent of the slaveholders, I should think the
movement, however impracticable, was in the hands of honest and sincere
men at any rate. (Applause) The fact is they cannot give the Bible to the
slave. It is idle to make the Bible and Slavery go hand in hand; they are at
war with each other, and the slaveholder knows it as well as any man. The
moment they begin to read, that moment they begin to be restless in their
chains. There are only three or four passages of Scripture that the slavehold-
er wants them to learn to read, and these he can read to them. They are the
passages which relate to servants being obedient &c., which they torture
into a sort of sanction of Slavery. These they like to have the slaves know,
but as to knowing anything about the Golden Rule, “All things whatsoever
ye would that others should do unto you do ye also to them,"15Douglass paraphrases Matt. 7: 12. or anything
of the doctrine of love to man, they do not want them to know anything
about it. The more ignorant he is, the better slave he makes, and hence the
most stringent laws are enacted throughout the South to prevent the slaves
from learning to read.
The cry of infidelity has long been raised against those who stand on
the old platform and adhere to the Old Anti-Slavery Organization. While I
was a member of the Methodist Episcopal Church, I had heard Garrison
denounced as an infidel and I wanted to hear what his infidelity consisted
in; and the moment I heard him pour out his soul in behalf of the down-
trodden bondsman and utter his voice against the oppressor as if his own
wife and children were in chains. I wanted to know nothing further of his
religious views; I felt that in his heart was the love of Christ, and that was
the Christianity for me. I did not want to know anything of his abstract
faith, for I felt very much as I suppose John the Baptist felt when he
received the tidings from Christ, saying: “Go tell John that the deaf hear,
the blind see, the poor have the Gospel preached unto them.”16Douglass paraphrases Matt. 11: 24-5 and Luke 7: 22. Those
works testified as to what manner of man he was, as to whence he came,
and what his objects were. When we see men binding up the wounds of
those who fall among thieves, administering to the necessities of the
down-trodden, and breaking off the chains of the bondsmen, it is evidence
enough that their works are of God, and, whatever may be their abstract
notions, Christ himself lives within them; for this was his spirit. He went
about doing good to the souls and bodies of men. Whenever the cry of
sorrow saluted his ear, there he was to soothe and console the afflicted
heart. Among the cries of joy and triumph that surrounded him as he
marched amid the multitudes, he heard the single voice of the blind man,
and when the multitude bid him hold his peace, Christ rebuked them and
turning to the poor man, said: “What will thou have me do unto thee?”17Douglass probably has in mind the response to the blind man who was scolded by the crowd for trying to attract Jesus' attention. As recorded in Mark 10: 49-51 and Luke 18: 40-41, Jesus, commanding the man to draw near, asked him, "What wilt thou that I should [shall] do unto thee?" The man requested that his sight be restored, and this was immediately done. I
believe if he had been on his way to create a world, he would have stopped
to attend to the wants of that poor blind man. “I will have mercy and not
sacrifice”18Douglass quotes either Matt. 9: 13 or Matt. 12: 7. is the great doctrine which distinguishes the Christian religion
from the Jewish ceremonial ritual and the current religion of our times. The
Christian religion is one of mercy, lifting up the bowed down and disconso-
late. O for a revival of this religion!
The great difficulty about our Christianity is, we have got certain
notions about religion that turn off our attention from humanity altogether.
We think that religion is the entertainment of a hope. I know there is a hope
in religion. I know there is faith and I know there is prayer about religion
and necessary to it, but God is most glorified when there is peace on earth
and good will towards men. It is said that when our Saviour came into the
world, the angels sang “Glory to God in the highest, on earth peace and
good will to men."19Douglass alludes to Luke 2: 14. It may be rendered with no violation to the original
text, I am told, “The highest glory to God is peace on earth and good will
towards men.” (Applause) This is the religion which Christ came to
establish; it was to promote peace on earth and good will towards men. The
religion of our country seems to have very little of peace on earth and good
will towards men in it. Instead of bestowing blessings on the peacemakers,
we as a nation confer blessings on war-makers. Instead of blessing those
who feed the hungry and clothe the naked, we confer honour upon men who
bury the lash in the quivering flesh of the bondmen, and exalt to the highest
office in the gift of the nation the men who have been most skillful in
teaching the nations war, and blowing out the brains of our enemies.
(Applause and hisses.)
Now I suppose that those who hiss think that I have stated what is not
true, but what is the fact? There is Zachary Taylor in the Presidential Chair.
You knew nothing about Taylor, until you heard of his blowing out the
brains of the Mexicans. (Applause and hisses.) No minister of the Gospel
ever came out and endorsed the Christian character of General Taylor
before he suc[ceeded in taking Monterrey].20These words, obliterated in NASS, 24 May 1849, are taken from NS, 1 June 1849. No minister of the Gospel
ever made him a member of the Home Missionary Society until he heard
that he had fought his battles in Mexico. No one thought of saying aught in
favour of that man for the Presidency until the Christianity of this country
learned that he had favoured the importation of blood-hounds from Cuba to
hunt down the Florida Indians.21In 1837 General Thomas S. Jesup (1788-1860), Taylor's predecessor as commander of the Florida army in the Second Seminole War (1835-42), first suggested using bloodhounds to track down Indians resisting deportation to the West. When Taylor assumed command in 1838 he voiced his support for the plan but declined to purchase any dogs, even though he had the War Department's authorization to do so. Not until the territorial government of Florida acquired its own bloodhounds from Cuba and offered them to the army in 1840 did he agree to accept several on a trial basis. The dogs' ineffectiveness in trailing Indians—the result, Taylor thought, of their having been trained in Cuba to track blacks—soon led to discontinuance of their use. Nevertheless, resolutions protesting the dogs' presence were introduced in Congress, some antislavery members asserting that the hounds had been imported not to end the Indian war but to hunt down runaway slaves living with the Seminoles. Although unsubstantiated, such allegations surfaced again during Taylor's presidential campaign. John T. Sprague, The Origin, Progress, and Conclusion of the Florida War (New York, 1848), 238-43; Charles Steams, Facts in the Life of Gen. Taylor; The Cuba Blood-Hound Importer, the Extensive Slave-Holder, and the Hero of the Mexican War!! (Boston, 1848), 6, 13-16; J. Reese Fry, A Life of Gen. Zachary Taylor (Philadelphia, 1848), 59-61; John K. Mahon, History of the Second Seminole War, 1835-1842 (Gainesville, Fla, 1967), 200-04, 265-67; James W. Covington, “Cuban Bloodhounds and the Seminoles," Florida Historical Quarterly, 33: 111-19 (October 1954); Z[achary] Taylor to General R. Jones, 28 July 1839, in FDP, 14 March 1848. (Hisses and applause.)
MR. GARRISON here repeated the reasons why the applause should be
controlled, and stated as a further reason, that he had been informed that
there was a sick person near. He hoped the Anti-Slavery friends would
control their feelings, and invited those who disapproved of what had been
said to come and take the platform when Mr. Douglass had concluded.
MR. DOUGLASS.—I mentioned yesterday in another place, that the
great men of the nation might always be taken as fair examples of the moral
sentiment of the people. I have taken Zachary Taylor who I believe is just as
good as those who voted for him; I do not think he is in any degree worse at
heart than those who had no objections to him as their candidate on moral
grounds. I am not at all lowering him that you need come to his defence. In
him I see yourselves reflected who have no moral objections to Slavery.
You only need a geographical change. You need only to be transported
from New York to New Orleans to become as much a slaveholder as
General Taylor at Baton Rouge. Sir, if the American pulpit had been what it
ought to have been, and what I trust it will yet be, no party in this country
could have been found base enough to have brought forward the name of
such a candidate for the suffrages of the American people. No! had the
American pulpit uttered its voice in righteous denunciation against Slavery
and War and kindred crimes, we should never have heard of such a being as
a legalized cut-throat presiding over the destinies of this nation. (Hisses.)
But I will touch no longer your idol, friends. I will leave him and pass
to another who is perhaps less an idol now, because he has not the reins of
Government in his hand, and no office to give to those who may be
disposed to hiss in his favour. (Laughter.) I allude to Henry Clay. I never
was more forcibly struck with the truth of Garrison ’s remarks, that he never
looked upon the slave but as upon a member of his own family, than when I
heard the various eulogies showered down upon this man by the North on
account of his letter on Emancipation, or rather Expatriation. You are
aware of the character of that letter. It sets out with a sort of argument
against Slavery, declares that the arguments that are put forth by Calhoun
and that class of politicians at the South in favour of eternizing Slavery are
erroneous, and then goes on to say, granting that the whites are superior to
the blacks, that it is the duty of the whites to instruct, improve, and en-
lighten the blacks. For so much I thank him, but take this out, and the
remainder is full of all manner of sin and injustice. With the exception of
these few sentiments, it is one of the most skillfully-contrived schemes for
oppressing the slave and perpetuating Slavery that I ever read. Mr. Clay,
after having laid down his platform of principles, that the slaves should be
enlightened and instructed by the superior classes, goes on to fix a day
when the slaves should be emancipated, and that day is set in this wise: All
children born of slave parents after the year 1860, shall be free at twenty-
five. And how free? Free to stay where they are, and work for a living? No.
Free to be expelled, free to be driven away from Kentucky and transported
to Africa, on the ground that it is their native land. But they are not free
even then, for he has another proviso, and it is this: That after having
arrived at the age of twenty-five, they shall be hired out under an officer of
the State for three years, in order to raise $150 to pay for their own
exportation from their homes and their families. Yet the people read this
letter and say, O! how just, how merciful, how humane, how philanthropic
is Henry Clay!
There is another point about this letter to which I object strongly; it is
this: You are aware that at the age of twenty-eight almost all the slaves have
families. Mr. Clay proposes that the slaves having families and children of
three, four, and five years of age shall be snatched from those children and
hurried off to Africa, leaving those children parentless, guardianless, with
no one to care for them. Those children are to live twenty-five years longer
in Slavery, and then to be hired out until they are twenty-eight years of age,
and afterward to be hurried out of the country. And yet young men and
young women, old men and old women, mothers, sisters, and daughters
read the cold-blooded proposition, from which, if it were to be applied to
white persons, they would shrink in horror, and they say, how good, how
kind, how philanthropic is Mr. Clay. Such is the man in whose pathway
they will strew flowers when he comes to the North—a man who boldly
proposes to sunder parents from their children, and compel them to leave
the country on pain of being again reduced to Slavery.
In another part of that letter he says that the trifling loss that would
result from Emancipation may [be] prevented by leaving the rights of the
owners undisturbed during the next twenty-five years. What is the meaning
of this? It is just this: That Henry Clay would leave the slaveholder, after
the year 1860 until the year 1885, in full possession of the right to sell
slaves from Kentucky into Louisiana or any of the more southern States.
The proposition is not, after all, that they shall emancipate their slaves at
the end of twenty-five years, but it allows them twenty-five years in which
to watch the New Orleans and Mobile markets, and if they do not see fit to
sell them during the course of ten, fifteen or twenty years, just in the last of
the twenty-fifth year, when the slave is about to grasp hold of Freedom,
their masters can put them upon the block and sell them to the highest
bidder; thus Kentucky will only be getting rid of Slavery to send their slaves
to clank their chains on Southern plantations.
Oh, the blinded moral sense of the American people! how lost to all
principle! how lost to all sense of justice! We can eulogize the man who
with iron heart would revive the horrors of the Slave Trade, under the
delusive idea of advancing the cause of Freedom.
Friends, I have not used the name of General Taylor or Henry Clay
because I have any personal pique towards them, or any difference of
political opinion with them, or political ends to serve. You have denied me
the right of citizenship, you have trampled on my rights as a man. I have no
voice in your politics, I only speak as one of the three millions of slaves in
your land. I speak as one of the injured party. I speak in the name of four
sisters and one brother who now live, if indeed they live at all, under the
burning sun and the biting lash of the slavedriver. I speak in behalf of those
whom I have left behind me. How would you speak if you yourselves had
relatives and friends in the condition of Slavery? Would you speak soft
words of the Church and clergy who could live indifferent to the condition
of your sisters and brothers? Think not because I am black that I love not my
kindred and friends.
“Fleecy locks and black complexion
Do not alter nature’s claims,
Skins may differ, but affection
Dwells in white and black the same."22Douglass slightly misquotes the last four lines of the second verse of William Cowper's “The Negro's Complaint. " Bailey, Poems of William Cowper, 454.
My sisters are as dear to me as yours can be to you. My brother lies as
near my heart as your brother can lie to yours. My mother, my family, my
friends are all as dear to me as yours can possibly be to you. O! if you could
put yourselves in the place of the slave the question would soon be carried;
there would be no differences at all; you would feel that we were your
brothers and sisters and Slavery would soon be at an end.