We Are in the Midst of a Moral Revolution: An Address Delivered in New York, New York, on May 10, 1854
WE ARE IN THE MIDST OF A MORAL REVOLUTION: AN ADDRESS DELIVERED IN NEW YORK, NEW YORK, ON 10 MAY 1854
Frederick Douglass' Paper, 19 May 1854. Other texts in New York Daily Tribune, 11 May 1854; New York Herald, 11 May 1854; New York Daily Times, 11 May 1854; New York Morning Express, 12 May 1854; New York Independent, 18 May 1854; British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Reporter, 3d ser., 2: 178-91 (1 August 1854).
Despite heavy rain on the evening of 10 May 1854, a large audience assembled at the Broadway Tabernacle for the fourteenth annual meeting of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. Douglass later described the gathering as composed of “the best water-proof.” Veteran abolitionist John Rankin of Brooklyn, New York, presided over the meeting. Following an organ voluntary, Freewill Baptist minister D. M. Graham gave the opening prayer. Lewis Tappan, William Goodell, and Charles B. Boynton then delivered lengthy addresses. At about 9:00 P.M. Douglass was introduced as the main speaker of the evening. At the close of his hour-long remarks, Douglass received “loud and enthusiastic applause mingled with some hisses.” Before leaving the platform, Douglass introduced the Reverend Michael Willis of Toronto, president of the Anti-Slavery Society of Canada, whose speech was the last of the evening. Washington (D.C.) National Era, 25 May, 1 June 1854.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS announced that within a fortnight not less than thirty passengers had passed through this city by the underground railroad, on their way to Canada, and a collection would be taken up for their benefit, which was done, while the hymn “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains,” adapted to the latitude of Georgia, was sung.1“From Greenland's Icy Mountains“ was the first line and familiar name of a missionary hymn written by Reginald Heber (1783-1826), bishop of Calcutta, and entitled “Before a Collection Made For the Society For the Propagation of the Gospel." Shortly after its introduction in the United States in the 1820s, Lowell Mason (1792-1872), then a Savannah bank clerk but later a prominent Boston singing master and hymnist, composed the tune that became its standard setting. Several antislavery versions of the hymn received wide circulation. The first stanza of the adaptation included in Maria Weston Chapman's Songs of the Free, and Hymns of Christian Freedom reads: “From Georgia's Southern Mountains—/ Potomac's either strand—/Where Carolina's fountains/Roll down their golden sand—/From many a lovely river—/From many a sunny plain,/They call us to deliver/Their land from error‘s chain." Chapman, Songs of Freedom, 55-56; Reginald Heber, Hymns, Written and Adapted to the Weekly Church Service of the Year (London, 1827),139-40; Lowell Mason, ed., The Boston Handel and Haydn Society Collection of Church Music, 9th ed. (Boston, 1830), 263; idem, Church Psalmody: A Collection of Psalms and Hymns, Adapted to Public Worship (Boston, I844), 479; Arthur Lowndes Rich, Lowell Mason: “The Father of Singing Among the Children" (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1946), I70; Free Soil Minstrel, 48-49.
He then rose and said: One year ago, when it was my privilege to address a few words to the members and friends of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, I took occasion in my humble way, to map out what I conceived to be the designs of the slave-power in respect to the subject of Slavery. These I stated to be the complete suppression of all anti-slavery discussion in the country, the extension of Slavery over all the territories of the US, legal nationalization of Slavery, and finally the extension of Slavery over the entire continent, and the absolute destruction of all liberty, supposed to be inconsistent with the permanency and supremacy of the slave-power. This was my reading of the then existing developments connected with the great evil with which this Society is organized to contend, and under God to overthrow and abolish throughout this otherwise glorious land.
We have now met once more; and, Sir, I am disposed to ask now as when we met last, where are we? Are we not all quite mistaken? Is not this anti-slavery movement a grand delusion? Are the sable descendants of Africa now in this country equal members of the human family? Is it your duty, my duty and the duty of us all to labor for their emancipation and enfranchisement? Was the holy apostle really wrapt in the hallowed fires of inspiration when he uttered the sublime declaration that of one blood God made all nations of men to dwell upon all the face of the earth, or was he mistaken?2Douglass paraphrases Acts 17: 26: “And [God] hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation." Is Liberty a high and holy human right, inherent, indestructible, and inseparable from the constitution and the nature of man, or is it the mere phantasy of dreamers and poets, the unsubstantial and shadowy coinage of a brilliant but disordered and shattered mind? Am I really a man or am I a beast of burden, a suitable article of property, a piece of merchandise? (A laugh.) I have sometimes thought myself a man, and have been occasionally regarded and treated as a man; but am I not mistaken? and have I not on this occasion strayed away from the society of my kind, and violated the divine order of things in presuming to stand here in the presence of this evidently intelligent audience, for the purpose of speaking what
I think and feel on the subject of American slavery? Sir, I am not beating the air. My questions are pertinent, though I admit they sound strange. But the times are also strange. Sentiments lately sprung up, dressed in the language of learning, bearing the authority of great names, and bountifully scattered over the land, give point and pertinency to these otherwise strange questions. It may seem strange for a man to light his lantern to walk forth in the sunshine, but the strangeness would vanish if by some sudden revolution in the universe night should usurp the place of day and our poor world were sent whirling and howling in darkness and in terror.
Well, sir, we are in the midst of not a physical, but a moral revolution—a revolution which threatens to extinguish the moral light which Heaven in mercy, has bestowed upon us, to enable us to go through our earthly pilgrimage in the peace and beauty of a common brotherhood. We are now involved in moral darkness, and for all the purposes of freedom in one half of this land, night has already taken the place of day; robbery, murder, and rape, the deeds of darkness stalk abroad in the daytime, while innocence, mercy, and goodness venture forth in the night. To three millions of the people of this country the joyous light of the sun has already become grievous. The fugitive takes up his solitary journey for freedom, not by the light of the rising day, but in the darkness of midnight. The ghost of Denmark's murdered king did not observe more cautiously the approach of morning than these lonely travellers from the House of American bondage.3Douglass alludes to Hamlet, act 1, sc. 5. in which the ghost of the slain King, Hamlet's father, anxiously awaits the coming of dawn, the signal that for yet another day he must be “confined to fast in fires." The day is spent by these strangers and pilgrims in hollow trees, like the night-birds, or in dens and caves, like wild beasts. They dread the sight of men more than they fear the sight of wild beasts; they would be surrounded by hungry wolves rather than by American Christians. How strange that man should prefer to meet the wolf or the wild boar to meeting his brother man! How strange that he should prefer the dim twinkling rays of the north star to heaven’s resplendent orb! In my humble belief, founded upon a diligent observation of passing events, there is a struggle awaiting the Abolitionists of this country such as has not shaken Christendom for centuries. That struggle will not merely involve the question of Slavery and anti-Slavery—the range will be higher, broader, deeper. It will be God or no God—Bible or no Bible—religion or no religion. The authority of man will be arrayed against the Government of the Almighty. In this great conflict men are already rapidly taking sides. Three
thousand ministers have already stepped into the grand arena, and others will speedily join them.
But my belief on this point is not based upon any plans which this society, or any particular body of men, may be devising. I believe in human power; but I believe also in divine power, acting through the nature of things, confounding the wisdom of the crafty, and bringing to nought the councils of the ungodly. Under this power men are becoming the most efficient agitators, while their throats are crammed with protests against all agitation of the subject. We are called agitators, disturbers, the cause of trouble and danger in this republic. I would decline no honor for myself or for my friends to which we are entitled, but I must decline this. It is not your will, nor my will, nor the act or will of all of us combined, that could have produced the agitation which has already taken place, or that can produce that which is soon to burst upon us. We are not the agitators. This conflict is founded in the nature of things and cannot be avoided; no platforms of parties, nor resolutions of churches can prevent it. It surpasses all the cunning of the statesman and all the learning of divines to arrest it. Liberty and Slavery are eternally forbidden to be at peace. Slavery, like Satan, defies the Omnipotent to arms. It is in its very nature a most impudent denial of every affirmation of God concerning the ends and aims for which man was created. A foul, dark and hateful hag, hostile to all that is true and beautiful among men, it invites the conflict now impending. There is no law—no land—no principles—of justice or mercy, safe in its neighborhood. It opposes active resistance to everything not in harmony with it, and ever strives to produce circumstances favorable to its own existence, continuance and prosperity. This is the law of its being, and its destiny is to exterminate, or to be exterminated. There is no middle ground; the choice it leaves to liberty is, KILL OR BE KILLED.
Sir, Stephen A. Douglas, the agent of this power, is doing his best just now to repeal the Missouri Compromise. This attempt has struck the north with amazement. Men could hardly at first believe the thing more than a joke. It is, however, no joke; and, besides, it is perfectly natural. Honesty is necessary to the faithful compliance with a bargain; and just here the South is deficient. Nothing is more true than that the whole moral and social atmosphere of Slavery is unfavorable to the growth of common honesty. The corner-stone of its moral is the maxim that “might makes right.” A bargain with a slaveholder will be kept so long as the slaveholder is unable to break it. The right to break comes with the wish and power to break. Audacious, mean and villainous as is the attempt to cheat the Northern
people out of what they have paid for and bargained for, I contend that the thing is perfectly natural and consistent with the essential character of slaveholders. Men do not gather grapes of thorns nor figs of thistles;4Douglass alludes to Matt. 7: 16: “Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?" and he is a fool who relies upon the honor of a man who has broken faith with God by enslaving man, the image of God. Piety has been found among infidels, honor among thieves, mercy among pirates; but piety, honor and mercy dwell not within the habitations of the buyers and sellers of men. A foul and stagnant pool can as well help sending out disease and death as Slavery can bad morals and bad faith.
Man can make no compact which is more sacred than the right of man to Liberty; and he who despises and tramples upon this God-given right, has qualified himself for any and every possible crime against God and man. The claim of property in man, is itself a stupendous fraud. Let this be understood and we shall cease to wonder at any aggression, however monstrous, which the slave-power may commit. We shall certainly never expect slaveholders to abide by a compact.
It may be said this is all assertion, but I ask, is it not all true? Tell me, if you can, where slaveholders have ever kept a compact which it was for their supposed interest to break. What treaty with the Indians have they respected? When has a slaveholder or a Slave State paid an honest debt when it could be profitably avoided? How does southern credit stand in London? Do you point me to the Constitution as a proof that slaveholders may be honorable parties to a compact? I answer—that there is not a single principle or provision in that great instrument in favor of human freedom which is not practically nullified. The Constitution, your glorious Constitution, lies in the mud of Charleston and New-Orleans, despised and powerless for everything except for Slavery, and with none so poor as to do it reverence. Massachusetts sent Mr. Hoar to South Carolina, and also Mr. Hubbard [to] New Orleans, to ask compliance with that clause of the constitution which declares that the citizens of each State shall enjoy all the rights of citizens of the several States.5Article IV, Section 2: “The citizens of each state shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several states." This is a most important compact. You know that both Mr. Hoar and Mr. Hubbard were compelled to escape for their lives.6South Carolina and Louisiana, along with other southern states, attempted to minimize contact between slaves and free Negroes by imprisoning free black seamen who came ashore while their ships were in port and by requiring their ship captains to post bond for the costs of confinement. Complaining that the laws interfered with freedom of navigation, increased shipping costs. and subjected Negro mariners to illegal imprisonment, owners of affected vessels initiated lawsuits and appealed to Congress for relief. Federal authorities, however, consistently refused to intervene in what they considered a matter of state jurisdiction. In 1843 the legislature of Massachusetts, home state of many black sailors, authorized the appointment of resident agents in Charleston and New Orleans “for the purpose of collecting and transmitting accurate information respecting the number and names of citizens of Massachusetts, who have heretofore been, or may be, . . . imprisoned without the allegation of any crime." The agents were also to introduce lawsuits that would force a Supreme Court ruling on the constitutionality of the offensive laws. A similar resolution was passed in 1844. Unable to persuade reputable men in either southern city to accept the assignment, Governor George N. Briggs commissioned two Bay State citizens as agents. Samuel Hoar (1778—1856), a Concord lawyer and former Whig congressman (1835-37) who had opposed the recognition of the Texas Republic and supported the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, was sent to Charleston. Upon his arrival in November 1844, the South Carolina legislature branded him a troublesome “emissary from a foreign Government" and urged Governor James H. Hammond to expel him from the state. Mob violence threatened in Charleston. Warned that he “had better be travelling and the sooner the better," Hoar quit the city—"because I must, not because I would"—eight days after his arrival. A similar fate befell the Louisiana agent, Henry Hubbard (?—c. 1870), a lawyer and reformer from Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Threats of lynching welcomed him to New Orleans on New Year's Day 1845. During the evening of 4 January several visitors advised him of the “great excitability“ regarding his mission. “[I]f you stay here another night," cautioned the city recorder, “your life certainly will be taken." Convinced that his “mission must be fruitless,” Hubbard boarded a steamboat for Cincinnati. In February the Massachusetts legislature circulated to all the states a resolution that protested the treatment accorded Hoar. Urging compliance with constitutional guarantees, it intimated that if similar outrages occurred “retaliation would follow." The resolution had no effect on South Carolina, which simply strengthened its Negro seamen's act. The Louisiana legislature stipulated that in the future agents such as Hubbard should be fined and subjected “to confinement at hard labor in the Penitentiary." Lib., 13, 20 December 1844, 10, 17, 24 January, 14 February 1845; Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, Thirteenth Annual Report (Boston, 1845), 40-44; idem. Fourteenth Annual Report (Boston, 1846), 21-23, 29-31; Philip M. Hamer, "Great Britain, the United States, and the Negro Seamen Acts, 1822—1848," JSH, 1: 3-28 (February 1935); Lader, Bold Brahmins, 129-30; David Duncan Wallace, The History of South Carolina, 4 vols. (New York, 1934), 2: 496-98; Henry Wilson, History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, 3 vols. (Boston, 1872-77), 1: 576-86; Goodell, American Slave Code, 362-63; NCAB, 22: 454-55.
I repeat, then, that a system which gives absolute power to one man over the body and soul of another man, is in its nature aggressive, and the parent of all manner of treachery and fraud. It is never satisfied, but becomes more rapacious with every new accession to its power. And precisely this is and has ever been the history and character of Slavery. It abhors boundaries; neither oceans, mountains nor deserts are a barrier to its progress. Like a dreadful pestilence, it walks over the globe, leaving all manner of ruin in its path. By a striking coincidence, we have illustrations of this tendency in arbitrary power on both sides of the Atlantic at this moment. It is on one side the bear, and on the other side the bloodhound—
the Emperor Nicholas,7Czar Nicholas I (1796-1855) ascended the Russian imperial throne during the Decembrist Revolt of 1825, an ill-fated military insurrection by both moderate and radical opponents of the regime. Determined to thwart further subversion, Nicholas established elaborate systems of censorship and surveillance. Political police scrutinized all aspects of Russian life, including the activities of travelers and resident foreigners. The Czar was equally fearful of any challenge to the European status quo, and his success in suppressing revolution abroad—most notably in Poland (1830) and Hungary (1849)—earned him the sobriquet “Gendarme of Europe." Sidney Monas, The Third Section: Police and Society in Russia Under Nicholas I (Cambridge, Mass., 1961); A. E. Presniakov, Emperor Nicholas I of Russia: The Apogee of Autocracy, 1825—1855 (Gulf Breeze, Fla, 1974), 36-38, 49-50, 86. and the slave power. Before these, neither treaties nor compacts are sacred. The chain of religion, letters, commerce, and brotherhood, which had bound Europe in a peace so profound and grateful during almost a half century, as to suggest the speedy advent of the time when the lamb and the lion shall lie down together,8Douglass adapts Isa. 11: 6: “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together." is suddenly and rapaciously broken; and now grim visaged war, clothed in steel and iron, and breathing fire, smoke and death, proceeds to its work. Who has turned loose this hell of horrors upon the world? A man clothed with absolute power over the bodies and souls of 60,000,000 of men, as good by nature as himself, is the answer. Nicholas wishes to extend his empire;9The Crimean War (1854-56) ruptured the Concert of Europe that had kept peace among the major powers since 1815. The conflict originated in a diplomatic contest between Russia and France to secure protective powers over the holy places and Christian population of the Ottoman Empire. To force concessions, Czar Nicholas I sent troops into Turkey's Danubian provinces in July 1853. Earlier, Nicholas had informed the British that should negotiations fail he planned to wage war and partition Turkey. Confident that England and France ultimately would intervene to preserve the European balance of power, the sultan declared war on Russia in October 1853. A month later the Turks suffered a major defeat in the naval battle of Sinop. When further efforts at mediation failed, Britain and France declared war on Russia on 28 March 1854. In September, an Anglo-French army launched an invasion of Russia’s Crimean peninsula that climaxed in a year-long seige of the port of Sebastopol. The war, incompetently managed and fought, ended in early 1856 when the new czar, Alexander II, agreed to withdraw from the Balkans and neutralize the Black Sea. W. Baring Pemberton, Battles of the Crimean War (New York, 1962), 15-26; Robert C. Binkley, Realism and Nationalism, 1852-1871 (New York, 1935), 157-80. and our slave power has a similar work on hand. Each nation has a “sick man” on its hands. Turkey is the sick man of Europe.10Douglass paraphrases Czar Nicholas I's often-quoted description of the Ottoman Empire: "We have a sick man on our hands, a man gravely-ill, it will be a great misfortune if one of these days, he slips through our hands, especially before the necessary arrangements are made." Edward Hamley, The War in the Crimea (Westport, Conn., 1891), 11. Mexico is the sick man of America; and a fellow feeling makes us wondrous kind. Stephen A. Douglas, (I wish he had another name), and Nicholas have had their heads together, and both have determined to drive liberty to the wall.
Tyranny is one the world over. Kossuth trembled as he passed through the refrigerating process of a southern tour, although he sealed his lips about American Slavery.11Welcomed with enthusiasm in most of the Northeast, Louis Kossuth excited little sympathy either for himself or for the cause of Hungarian independence when he toured the South in March and April 1852. Only occasionally—as among the Germans of St. Louis or at a hastily arranged rally in Mobile—did he encounter basically friendly audiences. Usually he was cold-shouldered, even in New Orleans, one of the few southern cities to issue an official invitation. Although Kossuth adhered to his previously stated intention not to become “mixed up" in the sectional controversy, a position that already had angered abolitionists, southerners identified him with the antislavery movement. His constant allusions to freedom, indeed his mere presence in the region, many believed, invited invidious analogies between his plight and that of southern slaves. Disappointed by the outcome of his southern tour, Kossuth returned to Washington only to find his political support declining. After a final tour of New England and New York, he quietly departed the United States on 14 July. Komlos, Kossuth in America, 121-27, 141-46; Spencer, Kossuth and Young America, 99-105, 181-82; Newman, Select Speeches of Kossuth, 292-306; Reinhard H. Luthin, “A Visitor From Hungary," South Atlantic Quarterly, 48: 29-34 (January 1948). By simply wishing for a plantation of negroes and for the privilege of urging them to toil under the sting of the whip, the vulgar traitor to liberty, who shall be nameless here, gets himself invited to visit New Orleans.12Douglass refers to John Mitchel, the Irish nationalist. Escaping from the British penal colony in Van Diemen's Land in 1853, Mitchel came to New York City and in January 1854 began publication of the Citizen, a weekly newspaper. In the second issue he responded to a letter from James Haughton, the Irish antislavery leader, urging Young Irelanders exiled in America to espouse the abolitionist cause. Employing "a little plain English," Mitchel denied that he was an abolitionist or that "it is a crime, or a wrong or even a peccadillo, to hold slaves, to buy slaves, to sell slaves, to keep slaves to their work by flogging or other needful coercion." In reply to Haughton's warning that silence would make each man a "participator" in the "wrongs" of slaveholding, Mitchel defiantly declared that "we will not be silent when occasion calls for speech; and as for being a participator in the wrongs, we, for our part, wish we had a good plantation, well stocked with healthy negroes, in Alabama." The antislavery press promptly repudiated Mitchel, once hailed as a martyr to freedom. Douglass's newspaper branded him a "traitor to humanity" and for several months featured anti-Mitchel poems and articles, including the widely publicized exchange of letters between Mitchel and Henry Ward Beecher, one of his most vocal critics. But if abolitionists censured Mitchel, southerners cheered him. In the spring of 1854 the mayor and council of Richmond, Virginia—not New Orleans, as Douglass asserts—invited him to visit their city. Mitchel accepted and in late May appeared as guest of honor at a banquet attended by locally prominent slaveowners. Virginians, he was told, gave him an enthusiastic reception "because you wished for a plantation in Alabama, and vindicated slavery against Reverend Beecher." Dillon, Life of John Mitchel, 2: 44-55; BFASR, new ser., 2: 82-83 (1 April 1854); FDP, 20, 27 January, 3, 10 February, 31 March, 7 April 1854; New York Daily Tribune, 14 January 1854; CIB, 246, 340-42. The passport to popular favor as well as to place and power in this country, is to defend the murderous system of slavery; do this, and all other sins are pardoned. It is evident that we do not stand as a people where we stood fifty years ago. There has been great physical progress, but morally the wheels of the Republic have moved backward. In just that without which all prosperity is but as chaff, we have made little progress.
Slavery was formerly a curse to be abhorred, a crime to be repented of, an evil to be abolished; but now it is spoken of in high places as a blessing. It has whitened into innocence, and demands to be received everywhere with the respect which is paid to honest and innocent institutions. But the other day, a slaveholder boasted that he had refused to shake hands with that time-wom advocate of liberty, Hon. Joshua R. Giddings.13Joshua Reed Giddings (1795-1864), radical abolitionist congressman from Ohio, was born in Athens, Pennsylvania, but spent his youth in New York and Ohio. After serving briefly in the War of 1812, he taught school and studied law, passing the bar in 1821. Elected to the House of Representatives on the Whig ticket in 1838, Giddings actively opposed the "gag rule," the annexation of Texas, and the Mexican War. On 21 March 1842, while negotiations with Great Britain over the Creole affair were still in progress, he introduced resolutions defending the right of the slaves on the Creole to mutiny against their captors and reaffirming the doctrine that slavery could not be enforced outside the southem states. Censured by a vote of 125 to 69 for trying to foment "excitement, dissatisfaction, and division," Giddings immediately resigned his seat, appealed to his constituents, and won reelection by an overwhelming margin. When the Whigs nominated Zachary Taylor in 1848, Giddings quit the party and joined the Free Soilers. Six years later, after passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, he affiliated with the Republicans. Passed over for renomination in 1858 because of his antislavery radicalism and declining health, Giddings was a delegate to the 1860 Republican convention at which he and his supporters forced the adoption of a plank endorsing the principles of the Declaration of Independence. From 1861 until his death he served as consul general to Canada. The occasion of his censure and resignation was recalled by Representative William Smith of Virginia during exchanges with Giddings on the floor of the House on 27 and 28 April 1854. Smith remembered that when the Ohioan, bidding farewell to his colleagues, "came to me, offering his hand, I did not pretend to be very busy, as some southern members did, who turned their backs upon him, but I said to him, 'I do not shake hands with you.' . . . [A]nd that is the way in which I treated his conduct, and that was the way he deserved to be treated by all." Congressional Globe, 33d Cong, 1st sess., 1018, Appendix, 554; FDP, 5 May 1854; Stewart, Joshua R. Giddings, 70-76, 259, 271-75; ACAB, 2: 641-42; DAB, 7: 260-61. A few days ago another slaveholder advised the Senate to vote down any proposition emanating from Senator Chase, confessedly one of the ablest statesmen in the country.
No better proof can be given, of the degeneracy of the nation than is furnished in the attacks made by our statesmen on the Declaration of Independence. These attacks have increased in number, and in grossness. Senator Pettit,14John Pettit (1807-77), an Indiana Democrat whose career included service as a state legislator, representative to Congress. chief justice of United States courts in Kansas Territory, and judge of the Indiana Supreme Court, had been chosen in 1853 to complete the remaining two years of an unexpired senate term. Although he had once claimed to be "devoted" to the Free Soil movement, by 1854 he was an enthusiastic advocate of popular sovereignty. While defending the Kansas-Nebraska Bill in the Senate on 20 February 1854, Pettit digressed from his main topic and, striving to demonstrate Negro inferiority, called the statement of equality in the Declaration of Independence "a self-evident lie." It was, he maintained, "not true in fact. . . not true in law. . . not true physically, mentally, or morally." Congressional Globe, 33d Cong, 1st sess., Appendix, 214; FDP, 3 March 1854; BDAC, 1450; ACAB, 4: 748. does not hesitate to denounce as a self-evident lie, precisely
what the Declaration holds to be a self-evident truth. He coarsely denies the doctrine of human equality as set forth in that instrument. He does not say that the truth is over-stated, or that it is under-stated. He does not say that the signers of the Declaration of Independence, were mistaken or subscribed to an error, but he characterizes the instrument as setting forth a self-evident lie. Mr. Calhoun called the same passage in the Declaration, a rhetorical flourish,15John C. Calhoun, speaking in the Senate on 27 June 1848, labeled the idea of equality a "false doctrine," only "hypothetically true," that had been "inserted" in the Declaration of Independence "without any necessity." Congressional Globe, 30th Cong., 1st sess., 876; NS, 7 July 1848. and McDuffie16George McDuffie. called it a blurred and tattered parchment: but Mr. Pettit calls it a “lie.” Less vulgar, but quite as self-sufficient is Mr. Clingman17Thomas Lanier Clingman (1812-97), a Whig until he joined the Democrats in 1852, served North Carolina in both the U.S. House of Representatives (1843-45, 1847-58) and the Senate (1858-61). Although he was a moderate on sectional issues—opposing the “gag rule“ and favoring the organization of new territories according to the formula “half slave, half free"—Clingman loyally defended the South and the institution of slavery. In a House speech on 22 December 1847, he refuted the idea that the Declaration of Independence should control government actions, noting that most free states denied the suffrage to blacks "because, as a class, they are inferior to the white race." After the Civil War, in which he attained the rank of brigadier general in the Confederate army, Clingman devoted himself to scientific studies of his native state. Congressional Globe, 30th Cong., lst sess., Appendix, 43-44; ACAB, 1: 658-59; DAB, 4: 220-21. of North Carolina. He also denies the doctrine that all men are created with the equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and denounces the negro as an inferior.
It is no part of my purpose to vindicate the understanding of the fathers, from the rude aspersions of their sons. Others may do that, and do it better than I can. The doctrine of the hour is that the negro is inferior to the white man, and that the superior race have a right to enslave the inferior. The argument is not new. It has been sounded by tyrants, in the ear of the oppressed in all ages. It is as old as oppression. No doubt the Israelites heard it four thousand years ago, from the black Egyptians. No doubt the proud Anglo-Saxons heard it from the lips of their Norman master within the last five centuries. For all nations have by turns, been slaves and slave-holders, the Egyptians were once superior to the Greeks, and the Greeks to the Romans, and the Romans were superior to the Normans, and the Normans superior to the Saxons, and now the Anglo-Saxon is boasting his superiority to the negro and to the Irishman, and upon this ground of superiority, rests the claim of ownership in the bodies and souls of men! This is its logic, the weak are unable to defend their liberty, therefore their liberty may be properly taken from them. He is inferior, therefore enslave
him, forbid him to learn to read and write, flog him to work, and pay him not for his labor. Give him no chance for improvement, keep him in ignorance, for it is not fit that negroes shall have knowledge. It would make them dangerous.
But I must bring my remarks to a close, the picture of the nation as I view it, is not a flattering one, and the prospect does not wear a cloudless front. If now I am asked what I have to recommend, my answer is ready: Continue to do precisely as you have done; continue to write, speak and publish; continue to enforce, by precept and by example, the great principles of liberty, justice and human brotherhood, as individuals, as church members, as citizens—at home, in the church, and at the ballot-box—yes, Sir, at the ballot-box. I do not subscribe to the mournful and misanthropic sentiment uttered to-day at another anti-slavery meeting, that political abolitionism is a failure;18On the morning of 10 May the American Anti-Slavery Society assembled for its twentieth anniversary meeting at the quarters of New York's Broadway Universalist Society. While reviewing the history of the slavery issue and explaining the need for a "total revolution in the religious and political institutions of the country," Wendell Phillips, the session's main speaker, remarked: "It is not too much to say today that political anti-slavery has failed." New York Daily Tribune, 11 May 1854. for, besides being altogether too despairing for my temperament, it is most strangely distant from the truth. The evidences of its incorrectness are seen all around us. The abolition of Slavery in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut and New York, proves that political anti-slavery—that anti-slavery which does not hesitate to make its words deeds—has not proved a failure. Indeed, political Abolition is now the most powerful agency at work for the overthrow of Slavery. The political anti-slavery press, and the political anti-slavery men, in Congress and out of Congress, are doing more to abolitionize the North and to abolish slavery, than any other earthly influence now in operation. It is that which has spoken in the Senate through the eloquent lips of Charles Sumner. It is that which sent the profound lawyer and statesman, Salmon P. Chase, to the Senate. It is that which has sustained, amid all the violence and malignity of satanic opposition, the calm, unclouded and tranquil William H. Seward—a man of whom even his enemies are proud—for he is confessedly one of the ablest men that ever adorned the Senate of the United States. Then there is Gerrit Smith, a model man in his person, and equally so in the quality of his mind and heart. It is to political Abolitionism that we are indebted for such an able and eloquent exponent of the great principles and doctrines of human freedom at Washington, as we have in him: emphatically, the noblest Roman of them all. No, sir, political abolition is not
a failure, any more than Christianity is a failure. It is now upward and onward. In my belief the cause will roll on, and roll till freedom shall be entirely triumphant. Let their motto be, labor and wait.