What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?: An Address Delivered in Rochester, New York, on 5 July 1852

WHAT TO THE SLAVE IS THE FOURTH OF JULY?: AN ADDRESS
DELIVERED IN ROCHESTER, NEW YORK, ON 5 JULY 1852

Frederick Douglass, Oration, Delivered in Corinthian Hall, Rochester, July 5th, 1852
(Rochester, 1852). Other texts in Frederick Douglass' Paper, 9 July 1852; Douglass,
Bondage and Freedom, 441-50; Woodson, Negro Orators and Their Orations, 197-223;
James M. Gregory, Frederick Douglass, the Orator (New York, 1893), 103-06, misdated
4 July 1852; Foner, Life and Writings, 2: 181-204.

Between five and six hundred people paying 12½ cents each gathered at
Corinthian Hall to hear Douglass give a Fourth of July address on 5 July 1852.
Douglass, who spoke at the invitation of the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery
Society, spent a great deal of time preparing this speech. “I have been en-
gaged in writing a Speech,” he wrote Gerrit Smith on 7 July 1852, “for the
4th. July which has taken up much of my extra time for the last two or three
weeks. You will readily think that the Speech ought to be good that has
required So much time. Well, Some here think [it] was a good Speech—
foremost among those who think So, is my friend Julia. She tells me it was
excellent!" James Sperry presided until Lindley Murray Moore was elected to
chair the meeting. The Reverend S. Ottman of Rush offered a prayer and the
Reverend Robert R. Raymond of Syracuse read the Declaration of Indepen-
dence. His recitation, said Frederick Douglass’ Paper, was “eloquent and
admirable, eliciting much applause throughout." Douglass delivered the
principal address. Upon resuming his seat at the conclusion of his remarks, he
was greeted by “a universal burst of applause.” William C. Bloss then
suggested a vote of thanks for Douglass. The vote was carried unanimously.
“A request was . . . made, that the Address be published in pamphlet form,
and seven hundred copies of it were subscribed on the spot.” The meeting
adjourned and Douglass subsequently published a pamphlet version of the
speech. Douglass to Gerrit Smith, 7 July 1852, 14 July 1852, Gerrit Smith
Papers, NSyU; FDP, 1, 16 July 1852.

Mr. President, Friends and Fellow Citizens: He who could address this
audience without a quailing sensation, has stronger nerves than I have. I do
not remember ever to have appeared as a speaker before any assembly more
shrinkingly, nor with greater distrust of my ability, than I do this day. A
feeling has crept over me, quite unfavorable to the exercise of my limited
powers of speech. The task before me is one which requires much previous
thought and study for its proper performance. I know that apologies of this
sort are generally considered flat and unmeaning. I trust, however, that
mine will not be so considered. Should I seem at ease, my appearance

would much misrepresent me. The little experience I have had in address-
ing public meetings, in country school houses, avails me nothing on the
present occasion.

The papers and placards say, that I am to deliver a 4th [of] July oration.
This certainly sounds large, and out of the common way, for me. It is true
that I have often had the privilege to speak in this beautiful Hall, and to
address many who now honor me with their presence. But neither their
familiar faces, nor the perfect gage I think I have of Corinthian Hall, seems
to free me from embarrassment.

The fact is, ladies and gentlemen, the distance between this platform
and the slave plantation, from which I escaped, is considerable—and the
difficulties to be overcome in getting from the latter to the former, are by no
means slight. That I am here to-day is, to me, a matter of astonishment as
well as of gratitude. You will not, therefore, be surprised, if in what I have
to say, I evince no elaborate preparation, nor grace my speech with any
high sounding exordium. With little experience and with less learning, I
have been able to throw my thoughts hastily and imperfectly together; and
trusting to your patient and generous indulgence, I will proceed to lay them
before you.

This, for the purpose of this celebration, is the 4th of July. It is the
birthday of your National Independence, and of your political freedom.
'This, to you, is what the Passover was to the emancipated people of God. It
carries your minds back to the day, and to the act of your great deliverance;
and to the signs, and to the wonders, associated with that act, and that day.
This celebration also marks the beginning of another year of your national
life; and reminds you that the Republic of America is now 76 years old. I
am glad, fellow-citizens, that your nation is so young. Seventy-six years,
though a good old age for a man, is but a mere speck in the life of a nation.
Three score years and ten is the allotted time for individual men;¹Ps. 90: 10. but
nations number their years by thousands. According to this fact, you are,
even now, only in the beginning of your national career, still lingering in
the period of childhood. I repeat, I am glad this is so. There is hope in the
thought, and hope is much needed, under the dark clouds which lower
above the horizon. The eye of the reformer is met with angry flashes,
portending disastrous times; but his heart may well beat lighter at the
thought that America is young, and that she is still in the impressible stage
of her existence. May he not hope that high lessons of wisdom, of justice

and of truth, will yet give direction to her destiny? Were the nation older,
the patriot’s heart might be sadder, and the reformer’s brow heavier. Its
future might be shrouded in gloom, and the hope of its prophets go out in
sorrow. There is consolation in the thought that America is young. Great
streams are not easily turned from channels, worn deep in the course of
ages. They may sometimes rise in quiet and stately majesty, and inundate
the land, refreshing and fertilizing the earth with their mysterious prop-
erties. They may also rise in wrath and fury, and bear away, on their angry
waves, the accumulated wealth of years of toil and hardship. They, how-
ever, gradually flow back to the same old channel, and flow on as serenely
as ever. But, while the river may not be turned aside, it may dry up,
and leave nothing behind but the withered branch, and the unsightly rock, to
how] in the abyss-sweeping wind, the sad tale of departed glory. As with
rivers so with nations.

Fellow-citizens, I shall not presume to dwell at length on the associa-
tions that cluster about this day. The simple story of it is that, 76 years ago,
the people of this country were British subjects. The style and title of your
“sovereign people” (in which you now glory) was not then born. You were
under the British Crown. Your fathers esteemed the English Government
as the home government; and England as the fatherland. This home gov-
ernment, you know, although a considerable distance from your home,
did, in the exercise of its parental prerogatives, impose upon its colonial
children, such restraints, burdens and limitations, as, in its mature judge-
ment, it deemed wise, right and proper.

But, your fathers, who had not adopted the fashionable idea of this day,
of the infallibility of government, and the absolute character of its acts,
presumed to differ from the home government in respect to the wisdom and
the justice of some of those burdens and restraints. They went so far in their
excitement as to pronounce the measures of government unjust, unreason-
able, and oppressive, and altogether such as ought not to be quietly submit-
ted to. I scarcely need say, fellow-citizens, that my opinion of those mea-
sures fully accords with that of your fathers. Such a declaration of agree-
ment on my part would not be worth much to anybody. It would, certainly,
prove nothing, as to what part I might have taken, had I lived during the
great controversy of 1776. To say now that America was right, and En-
gland wrong, is exceedingly easy. Everybody can say it; the dastard, not
less than the noble brave, can flippantly discant on the tyranny of England
towards the American Colonies. It is fashionable to do so; but there was a
time when to pronounce against England, and in favor of the cause of the

colonies, tried men’s souls.²Douglass paraphrases the opening line of Thomas Paine's ﬁrst Crisis paper, 23 December 1776. The Political Writings of Thomas Paine, 2 vols. (Boston, 1859), l: 75. They who did so were accounted in their day,
plotters of mischief, agitators and rebels, dangerous men. To side with the
right, against the wrong, with the weak against the strong, and with the
oppressed against the oppressor! here lies the merit, and the one which, of
all others, seems unfashionable in our day. The cause of liberty may be
stabbed by the men who glory in the deeds of your fathers. But, to proceed.

Feeling themselves harshly and unjustly treated by the home govern-
ment, your fathers, like men of honesty, and men of spirit, earnestly sought
redress. They petitioned and remonstrated; they did so in a decorous,
respectful, and loyal manner. Their conduct was wholly unexceptionable.
This, however, did not answer the purpose. They saw themselves treated
with sovereign indifference, coldness and scorn. Yet they persevered.
They were not the men to look back.

As the sheet anchor takes a firmer hold, when the ship is tossed by the
storm, so did the cause of your fathers grow stronger, as it breasted the
chilling blasts of kingly displeasure. The greatest and best of British
statesmen admitted its justice, and the loftiest eloquence of the British
Senate came to its support. But, with that blindness which seems to be the
unvarying characteristic of tyrants, since Pharoah and his hosts were
drowned in the Red Sea, the British Government persisted in the exactions
complained of.

The madness of this course, we believe, is admitted now, even by
England; but we fear the lesson is wholly lost on our present rulers.

Oppression makes a wise man mad. Your fathers were wise men, and if
they did not go mad, they became restive under this treatment. They felt
themselves the victims of grievous wrongs, wholly incurable in their colo-
nial capacity. With brave men there is always a remedy for oppression. Just
here, the idea of a total separation of the colonies from the crown was born!
It was a startling idea, much more so, than we, at this distance of time,
regard it. The timid and the prudent (as has been intimated) of that day,
were, of course, shocked and alarmed by it.

Such people lived then, had lived before, and will, probably, ever have
a place on this planet; and their course, in respect to any great change, (no
matter how great the good to be attained, or the wrong to be redressed by
it), may be calculated with as much precision as can be the course of the

stars. They hate all changes, but silver, gold and copper change! Of this
sort of change they are always strongly in favor.

These people were called tories in the days of your fathers; and the
appellation, probably, conveyed the same idea that is meant by a more
modern, though a somewhat less euphonious term, which we often find in
our papers, applied to some of our old politicians.³Douglass probably refers to the term “Hunker,” which was applied to conservative Democrats in New York state politics in the late 1840s. The label originally referred to the ﬁscally conservative faction of the state ‘s Democratic party, but after an 1847 Split over the Wilmot Proviso the term also differentiated Unionist followers of William L. Marcy and Daniel S. Dickinson from the antislavery “Bamburners.” A study of the election of 1848 suggests that the word “was used to ridicule the conservatives' strenuous efforts to get a large ‘hunk' of the spoils of ofﬁce; others thought it was a corruption of the Dutch slang word hanker, freely translated as ‘greedy.'" By the 1850s the “Hunker" designation was commonly applied to the great conservative Unionist majority of the Democratic party throughout the North. Rayback, Free Soil, 16n; Nichols, Democratic Machine, 18, 198-99.

Their opposition to the then dangerous thought was earnest and power-
ful; but, amid all their terror and affrighted vociferations against it, the
alarming and revolutionary idea moved on, and the country with it.

On the 2d of July, 1776, the old Continental Congress, to the dismay of
the lovers of ease, and the worshippers of property, clothed that dreadful
idea with all the authority of national sanction. They did so in the form of a
resolution; and as we seldom hit upon resolutions, drawn up in our day,
whose transparency is at all equal to this, it may refresh your minds and help
my story if I read it.

“Resolved, That these united colonies are, and of right, ought to be
free and Independent States; that they are absolved from all allegiance
to the British Crown; and that all political connection between them
and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, dissolved."⁴A text of the quoted resolution, which indicates that the word “totally” appeared before the word “dissolved,” may be found in W. C. Ford et al., eds, Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774-1789, 34 vols. (Washington, DC, 1904—37), 5: 507.

Citizens, your fathers made good that resolution. They succeeded; and
to-day you reap the fruits of their success. The freedom gained is yours; and
you, therefore, may properly celebrate this anniversary. The 4th of July is
the first great fact in your nation’s history—the very ring-bolt in the chain
of your yet undeveloped destiny.

Pride and patriotism, not less than gratitude, prompt you to celebrate
and to hold it in perpetual remembrance. I have said that the Declaration of
Independence is the RING-BOLT to the chain of your nation’s destiny; so,

indeed, I regard it. The principles contained in that instrument are saving
principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all
places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.

From the round top of your ship of state, dark and threatening clouds
may be seen. Heavy billows, like mountains in the distance, disclose to the
leeward huge forms of ﬂinty rocks! That bolt drawn, that chain broken,
and all is lost. Cling to this day—cling to it, and to its principles, with the
grasp of a storm-tossed mariner to a spar at midnight.

The coming into being of a nation, in any circumstances, is an interest-
ing event. But, besides general considerations, there were peculiar circum-
stances which make the advent of this republic an event of special attrac-
tiveness.

The whole scene, as I look back to it, was simple, digniﬁed and
sublime.

The population of the country, at the time, stood at the insignificant
number of three millions. The country was poor in the munitions of war.
The population was weak and scattered, and the country a wilderness
unsubdued. There were then no means of concert and combination, such as
exist now. Neither steam nor lightning had then been reduced to order and
discipline. From the Potomac to the Delaware was a journey of many days.
Under these, and innumerable other disadvantages, your fathers declared
for liberty and independence and triumphed.

Fellow Citizens, I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this
republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men.
They were great men too—great enough to give fame to a great age. It does
not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly
great men. The point from which I am compelled to view them is not,
certainly, the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great
deeds with less than admiration. They were statesmen, patriots and heroes,
and for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite
with you to honor their memory.

They loved their country better than their own private interests; and,
though this is not the highest form of human excellence, all will concede
that it is a rare virtue, and that when it is exhibited, it ought to command
respect. He who will, intelligently, lay down his life for his country, is a
man whom it is not in human nature to despise. Your fathers staked their
lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, on the cause of their country.
In their admiration of liberty, they lost sight of all other interests.

They were peace men; but they preferred revolution to peaceful submission

to bondage. They were quiet men; but they did not shrink from
agitating against oppression. They showed forbearance; but that they knew
its limits. They believed in order; but not in the order of tyranny. With
them, nothing was “settled” that was not right. With them, justice, liberty
and humanity were “ﬁnal;” not slavery and oppression. You may well
cherish the memory of such men. They were great in their day and genera-
tion. Their solid manhood stands out the more as we contrast it with these
degenerate times.

How circumspect, exact and proportionate were all their movements!
How unlike the politicians of an hour! Their statesmanship looked beyond
the passing moment, and stretched away in strength into the distant future.
They seized upon eternal principles, and set a glorious example in their
defence. Mark them!

Fully appreciating the hardship to be encountered, firmly believing in
the right of their cause, honorably inviting the scrutiny of an on-looking
world, reverently appealing to heaven to attest their sincerity, soundly
comprehending the solemn responsibility they were about to assume,
wisely measuring the terrible odds against them, your fathers, the fathers of
this republic, did, most deliberately, under the inspiration of a glorious
patriotism, and with a sublime faith in the great principles of justice and
freedom, lay deep the corner-stone of the national superstructure, which
has risen and still rises in grandeur around you.

Of this fundamental work, this day is the anniversary. Our eyes are met
with demonstrations of joyous enthusiasm. Banners and pennants wave
exultingly on the breeze. The din of business, too, is hushed. Even Mam-
mon seems to have quitted his grasp on this day. The ear-piercing fife and
the stirring drum unite their accents with the ascending peal of a thousand
church bells. Prayers are made, hymns are sung, and sermons are preached
in honor of this day; while the quick martial tramp of a great and mul-
titudinous nation, echoed back by all the hills, valleys and mountains of a
vast continent, bespeak the occasion one of thrilling and universal
interest—a nation’s jubilee.

Friends and citizens, I need not enter further into the causes which led
to this anniversary. Many of you understand them better than I do. You
could instruct me in regard to them. That is a branch of knowledge in which
you feel, perhaps, a much deeper interest than your speaker. The causes
which led to the separation of the colonies from the British crown have
never lacked for a tongue. They have all been taught in your common
schools, narrated at your ﬁresides, unfolded from your pulpits, and thundered

from your legislative halls, and are as familiar to you as household
words. They form the staple of your national poetry and eloquence.

I remember, also, that, as a people, Americans are remarkably familiar
with all facts which make in their own favor. This is esteemed by some as a
national trait—perhaps a national weakness. It is a fact, that whatever
makes for the wealth or for the reputation of Americans, and can be had
cheap! will be found by Americans. I shall not be charged with slandering
Americans, if I say I think the American side of any question may be
safely left in American hands.

I leave, therefore, the great deeds of your fathers to other gentlemen
whose claim to have been regularly descended will be less likely to be
disputed than mine!

THE PRESENT.

My business, if I have any here to-day, is with the present. The ac-
cepted time with God and his cause is the ever-living now.

“Trust no future, however pleasant,
Let the dead past bury its dead;
Act, act in the living present,
Heart within, and God overhead."⁵The stanza quoted is from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's “A Psalm of Life." Poems, 22.

We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and
to the future. To all inspiring motives, to noble deeds which can be gained
from the past, we are welcome. But now is the time, the important time.
Your fathers have lived, died, and have done their work, and have done
much of it well. You live and must die, and you must do your work. You
have no right to enjoy a child’s share in the labor of your fathers, unless
your children are to be blest by your labors. You have no right to wear out
and waste the hard-earned fame of your fathers to cover your indolence.
Sydney Smith⁶Anglican minister Sydney Smith (1771-1845) was a master satirical essayist and lecturer. A highly partisan Whig, his barbed wit was employed to great effect in the causes of Catholic emancipation and parliamentary reform. DNB, 18: 527-31. tells us that men seldom eulogize the wisdom and virtues of
their fathers, but to excuse some folly or wickedness of their own. This
truth is not a doubtful one. There are illustrations of it near and remote,
ancient and modern. It was fashionable, hundreds of years ago, for the
children of Jacob to boast, we have “Abraham to our father,” when they

had long lost Abraham’s faith and spirit.⁷Douglass appears to allude to a passage from Luke 3: 8: “Bring forth therefore fruits worthy of repentance. and begin not to say within yourselves, We have Abraham to our father: for I say unto you, That God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham." That people contented them-
selves under the shadow of Abraham’s great name, while they repudiated
the deeds which made his name great. Need I remind you that a similar
thing is being done all over this country to-day? Need I tell you that the
Jews are not the only people who built the tombs of the prophets, and
garnished the sepulchres of the righteous? Washington could not die till he
had broken the chains of his slaves.⁸At the time of his death, George Washington owned or held claim to over three hundred slaves. His will provided that “upon the decease of my wife it is my . . . desire that all slaves whom I hold in my own right shall receive their freedom." Matthew T. Mellon, Early American Views on Negro Slavery From the Letters and Papers of the Founders of the Republic (1934; New York, 1969), 29-81; Walter H. Mazyck, George Washington and the Negro (Washington, DC, 1932), 133-38; George Livermore, An Historical Research Respecting the Opinions of the Founders of the Republic on Negroes as Slaves, as Citizens, and as Soldiers, 4th ed. (1862; New York, 1968), 28-31; Paul F. Boller, “Washington, the Quakers, and Slavery," JNH, 46: 83-88 (April 1961). Yet his monument is built up by the
price of human blood, and the traders in the bodies and souls of men,
shout—“We have Washington to our father.” Alas! that it should be so;
yet so it is.

“The evil that men do, lives after them,
The good is oft’ interred with their bones."⁹Julius Caesar, act 3, sc. 2, line 76.

Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to
speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your
national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of
natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to
us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the
national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for
the blessings resulting from your independence to us?

Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an afﬁrmative answer
could be truthfully returned to these questions! Then would my task be
light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold, that a
nation’s sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the
claims of gratitude, that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless
benefits? Who so stolid and selﬁsh, that would not give his voice to swell
the hallelujahs of a nation ’s jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been
torn from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that, the dumb might
eloquently speak, and the “lame man leap as an hart.”

But, such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the
disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious
anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable dis-
tance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not
enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and
independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me.
The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and
death to me. This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I
must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of
liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman
mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by
asking me to speak to-day? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let
me warn you that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation whose
crimes, towering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the
Almighty, burying that nation in irrecoverable ruin! I can to-day take up the
plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people!

“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! we wept when we
remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst
thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of us a song;
and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the
songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? If I
forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not
remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth."¹⁰Ps. 137: 1-6.

Fellow-citizens; above your national, tumultous joy, I hear the
mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday,
are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach
them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children
of sorrow this day, “may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my
tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!” To forget them, to pass lightly
over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be
treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach
before God and the world. My subject, then fellow-citizens, is AMERICAN
SLAVERY. I shall see, this day, and its popular characteristics, from the
slave’s point of view. Standing, there, identified with the American
bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my
soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to
me than on this 4th of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past.

or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally
hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and
solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the
crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity
which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of
the constitution and the Bible, which are disregarded and trampled upon,
dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can
command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery—the great sin and
shame of America. “I will not equivocate; I will not excuse;”¹¹Douglass quotes from the first issue of the Liberator, in which William Lloyd Garrison promised, “I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—and I will be heard." Lib., 1 January 1831; John L. Thomas, The Liberator: William Lloyd Garrison (Boston, 1963), 128. I will use
the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me
that any man, whosejudgement is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at
heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be right and just.

But I fancy I hear some one of my audience say, it is just in this
circumstance that you and your brother abolitionists fail to make a favor-
able impression on the public mind. Would you argue more, and denounce
less, would you persuade more, and rebuke less, your cause would be much
more likely to succeed. But, I submit, where all is plain there is nothing to
be argued. What point in the anti-slavery creed would you have me argue?
On what branch of the subject do the people of this country need light?
Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man? That point is conceded
already. Nobody doubts it. The slaveholders themselves acknowledge it in
the enactment of laws for their government. They acknowledge it when
they punish disobedience on the part of the slave. There are seventy-two
crimes in the State of Virginia, which, if committed by a black man, (no
matter how ignorant he be), subject him to the punishment of death; while
only two of the same crimes will subject a white man to the like punish-
ment.¹²Douglass probably relies on [Weld], American Slavery, 149, which contrasts capital offences in Virginia for slaves and whites. What is this but the acknowledgement that the slave is a moral,
intellectual and responsible being? The manhood of the slave is conceded.
It is admitted in the fact that Southern statute books are covered with
enactments for bidding, under severe fines and penalties, the teaching ofthe
slave to read or to write. When you can point to any such laws, in reference
to the beasts of the field, then I may consent to argue the manhood of the
slave. When the dogs in your streets, when the fowls of the air, when the

cattle on your hills, when the fish of the sea, and the reptiles that crawl,
shall be unable to distinguish the slave from a brute, then will I argue with
you that the slave is a man!

For the present, it is enough to afﬁrm the equal manhood of the negro
race. Is it not astonishing that, while we are ploughing, planting and
reaping, using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses, constructing
bridges, building ships, working in metals of brass, iron, copper, silver and
gold; that, while we are reading, writing and cyphering, acting as clerks,
merchants and secretaries, having among us lawyers, doctors, ministers,
poets, authors, editors, orators and teachers; that, while we are engaged in
all manner of enterprises common to other men, digging gold in California,
capturing the whale in the Pacific, feeding sheep and cattle on the hill-side,
living, moving, acting, thinking, planning, living in families as husbands,
wives and children, and, above all, confessing and worshipping the Chris-
tian’s God, and looking hopefully for life and immortality beyond the
grave, we are called upon to prove that we are men!

Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty? that he is the
rightful owner of his own body? You have already declared it. Must I argue
the wrongfulness of slavery? Is that a question for Republicans? ls it to be
settled by the rules of logic and argumentation, as a matter beset with great
difﬁculty, involving a doubtful application of the principle of justice, hard
to be understood? How should I look to-day, in the presence of Americans,
dividing, and subdividing a discourse, to show that men have a natural right
to freedom? speaking of it relatively, and positively, negatively, and affir-
matively. To do so, would be to make myself ridiculous, and to offer an
insult to your understanding. There is not a man beneath the canopy of
heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.

What, am I to argue that it is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of
their liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant of their
relations to their fellow men, to beat them with sticks, to flay their ﬂesh
with the lash, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell
them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock out their teeth, to burn
their flesh, to starve them into obedience and submission to their masters?
Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood, and stained with
pollution, is wrong? No! I will not. I have better employments for my time
and strength, than such arguments would imply.

What, then, remains to be argued? Is it that slavery is not divine; that
God did not establish it; that our doctors of divinity are mistaken? There is
blasphemy in the thought. That which is inhuman, cannot be divine! Who

can reason on such a proposition? They that can, may; I cannot. The time
for such argument is past.

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is
needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would,
to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, wither-
ing sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is
not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and
the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the con-
science of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be
startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against
God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that
reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and
cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a
sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness,
swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your
denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty
and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and
thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him,
mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to
cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a
nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are
the people of these United States, at this very hour.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the
monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South
America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay
your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will
say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy,
America reigns without a rival.

THE INTERNAL SLAVE TRADE.

Take the American slave-trade, which, we are told by the papers, is
especially prosperous just now. Ex-Senator Benton¹³Thomas Hart Benton (1782-1858) served as a U.S. senator from Missouri from 1821 to 1851. Born near Hillsboro, North Carolina, Benton brieﬂy studied at the University of North Carolina and at William and Mary College. Despite a promising start on a legal and political career in Tennessee, Benton migrated to Missouri after service in the War of 1812. Elected to the Senate upon Missouri's admission to the Union, he became an important Jacksonian Democrat and spokesman for western interests. When he failed to secure reelection to the Senate in 1850, Benton returned to Congress as a representative from 1853 to 1855 but lost his bid for a second term in 1854. Benton probably used his observation on slave prices to bolster his persistent denial that slaveholding interests were insecure in the Union. Although the remark does not appear in his published speeches attacking Calhoun's appeal for southern congressional unity in 1849 or in his major speeches delivered during the Senate debate on the 1850 compromise measures, Benton repeated this observation several years later when criticizing the1850 secessionist movements in South Carolina and Mississippi: “[T]here is no danger to slavery in any slave State. Property is timid! and slave property above all: and the market is the test of safety and danger to all property. . . . Now. how is it with slave property, tried by this unerring standard? Has it been sinking in price since the year 1835? since the year of the first alarm manifesto in South Carolina. and the first of Mr. Calhoun's twenty years' alarm speeches in the Senate? On the contrary, the price has been constantly rising the whole time—and it is still rising although it has attained a height incredible to have been predicted twenty years ago." Thomas Han Benton, Thirty Years' View, 2 vols. (New York, 1854-56), 2: 782; Elbert B. Smith, Magniﬁcent Missourian: The Life of Thomas Hart Benton (Philadelphia, 1958); William N. Chambers, Old Bullion Benton: Senator from the West (Boston. 1956); Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas H. Benton (Boston, 1899); ACAB, 1: 241-43; DAB, 2: 210-13. tells us that the price

of men was never higher than now. He mentions the fact to show that
slavery is in no danger. This trade is one of the peculiarities of American
institutions. It is carried on in all the large towns and cities in one-half of
this confederacy; and millions are pocketed every year, by dealers in this
horrid traffic. In several states, this trade is a chief source of wealth. It is
called (in contradistinction to the foreign slave-trade) “the internal slave-
trade.” It is, probably, called so, too, in order to divert from it the horror
with which the foreign slave-trade is contemplated. That trade has long
since been denounced by this government, as piracy. It has been denounced
with burning words, from the high places of the nation, as an execrable
traffic. To arrest it, to put an end to it, this nation keeps a squadron, at
immense cost, on the coast of Africa. Everywhere, in this country, it is safe
to speak of this foreign slave-trade, as a most inhuman trafﬁc, opposed
alike to the laws of God and of man. The duty to extirpate and destroy it, is
admitted even by our DOCTORS OF DIVINITY. In order to put an end to it,
some of these last have consented that their colored brethren (nominally
free) should leave this country, and establish themselves on the western
coast of Africal! It is, however, a notable fact that, while so much execra-
tion is poured out by Americans upon those engaged in the foreign slave-
trade, the men engaged in the slave-trade between the states pass without
condemnation, and their business is deemed honorable.

Behold the practical operation of this internal slave-trade, the Ameri-
can slave-trade, sustained by American politics and American religion.
Here you will see men and women reared like swine for the market. You
know what is a swine-drover? I will show you a man-drover. They inhabit
all our Southern States. They perambulate the country, and crowd the

highways of the nation, with droves of human stock. You will see one of
these human flesh-jobbers, armed with pistol, whip and bowie-knife, driv-
ing a company of a hundred men, women, and children, from the Potomac
to the slave market at New Orleans. These wretched people are to be sold
singly, or in lots, to suit purchasers. They are food for the cotton-field, and
the deadly sugar-mill. Mark the sad procession, as it moves wearily along,
and the inhuman wretch who drives them. Hear his savage yells and his
blood-chilling oaths, as he hurries on his affrighted captives! There, see the
old man, with locks thinned and gray. Cast one glance, if you please, upon
that young mother, whose shoulders are bare to the scorching sun, her briny
tears falling on the brow of the babe in her arms. See, too, that girl of
thirteen, weeping, yes! weeping, as she thinks of the mother from whom
she has been torn! The drove moves tardily. Heat and sorrow have nearly
consumed their strength; suddenly you hear a quick snap, like the discharge
of a riﬂe; the fetters clank, and the chain rattles simultaneously; your ears
are saluted with a scream, that seems to have torn its way to the centre of
your soul! The crack you heard, was the sound of the slave-whip; the
scream you heard, was from the woman you saw with the babe. Her speed
had faltered under the weight of her child and her chains! that gash on her
shoulder tells her to move on. Follow this drove to New Orleans. Attend the
auction; see men examined like horses; see the forms of women rudely and
brutally exposed to the shocking gaze of American slave-buyers. See this
drove sold and separated forever; and never forget the deep, sad sobs that
arose from that scattered multitude. Tell me citizens, WHERE, under the
sun, you can witness a spectacle more fiendish and shocking. Yet this is but
a glance at the American slave-trade, as it exists, at this moment, in the
ruling part of the United States.

I was born amid such sights and scenes. To me the American slave-
trade is a terrible reality. When a child, my soul was often pierced with a
sense of its horrors. I lived on Philpot Street, Fell’s Point, Baltimore, and
have watched from the wharves, the slave ships in the Basin, anchored
from the shore, with their cargoes of human ﬂesh, waiting for favorable
winds to waft them down the Chesapeake. There was, at that time, a grand
slave mart kept at the head of Pratt Street, by Austin Woldfolk.¹⁴Actually Austin Woolfolk of Augusta, Georgia, who came to Baltimore in 1819 and became the best-known slave trader in the area in the 1820s and early 1830s. Attracted by the city 's commercial shipping facilities, Woolfolk and his relatives made Baltimore the headquarters for their activities and annually transported between 230 and 460 slaves to New Orleans. Agents for Woolfolk were sent into counties throughout Maryland and his advertisements in local newspapers throughout the 1820s indicated that Woolfolk would pay “the highest prices and in cash" for young slaves. In his Narrative. Douglass noted that “if a slave was convicted of any high misdemeanor, became unmanageable, or evinced a determination to run away, he was brought immediately here [Lloyd's home plantation]. severely whipped, put on board the sloop, carried to Baltimore, and sold to Austin Woolfolk, or some other slave trader, as a warning to the slaves remaining." Woolfolk's slave-trading activities declined in the early 1830s owing to increased competition from larger ﬁrms, a decrease in the number of slaves available for sale to traders as owners who left the area took the slaves into the western territories or manumitted them, and the increased opposition of Marylanders to slave trading within the state. Douglass, Narrative, 32; William Calderhead, “The Role of the Professional Slave Trader in a Slave Economy: Austin Woolfolk, A Case Study," Civil War History, 23: 195-211 (September 1977). His agents

were sent into every town and county in Maryland, announcing their ar-
rival, through the papers, and on ﬂaming “hand-bills,” headed CASH FOR
NEGROES. These men were generally well dressed men, and very captivat-
ing in their manners. Ever ready to drink, to treat, and to gamble. The fate
of many a slave has depended upon the turn of a single card; and many a
child has been snatched from the arms of its mother by bargains arranged in
a state of brutal drunkenness.

The flesh-mongers gather up their victims by dozens, and drive them,
chained, to the general depot at Baltimore. When a sufficient number have
been collected here, a ship is chartered, for the purpose of conveying the
forlorn crew to Mobile, or to New Orleans. From the slave prison to the
ship, they are usually driven in the darkness of night; for since the anti-
slavery agitation, a certain caution is observed.

In the deep still darkness of midnight, I have been often aroused by the
dead heavy footsteps, and the piteous cries of the chained gangs that passed
our door. The anguish of my boyish heart was intense; and I was often
consoled, when speaking to my mistress in the morning, to hear her say that
the custom was very wicked; that she hated to hear the rattle of the chains,
and the heart-rending cries. I was glad to find one who sympathised with
me in my horror.

Fellow-citizens, this murderous trafﬁc is, to-day, in active operation in
this boasted republic. In the solitude of my spirit, I see clouds of dust raised
on the highways of the South; I see the bleeding footsteps; I hear the doleful
wail of fettered humanity, on the way to the slave-markets, where the
victims are to be sold like horses, sheep, and swine, knocked off to the
highest bidder. There I see the tenderest ties ruthlessly broken, to gratify
the lust, caprice and rapacity of the buyers and sellers of men. My soul
sickens at the sight.

“Is this the land your Fathers loved,
The freedom which they toiled to win?

Is this the earth whereon they moved?
Are these the graves they slumber in?”¹⁵Douglass slightly alters the ﬁrst four lines of John Greenleaf Whittier's “Stanzas for the Times." Whittier, Poetical Works, 3: 35.

But a still more inhuman, disgraceful, and scandalous state of things
remains to be presented.

By an act of the American Congress, not yet two years old, slavery has
been nationalized in its most horrible and revolting form. By that act,
Mason & Dixon’s line has been obliterated; New York has become as
Virginia; and the power to hold, hunt, and sell men, women, and children
as slaves remains no longer a mere state institution, but is now an institution
of the whole United States. The power is co-extensive with the star-
spangled banner and American Christianity. Where these go, may also go
the merciless slave-hunter. Where these are, man is not sacred. He is a bird
for the Sportsman’s gun. By that most foul and fiendish of all human
decrees, the liberty and person of every man are put in peril. Your broad
republican domain is hunting ground for men. Not for thieves and robbers,
enemies of society, merely, but for men guilty of no crime. Your law-
makers have commanded all good citizens to engage in this hellish sport.
Your President, your Secretary of State, your lords, nobles, and ecclesias-
tics, enforce, as a duty you owe to your free and glorious country, and to
your God, that you do this accursed thing. Not fewer than forty Americans
have, within the past two years, been hunted down and, without a
moment’s warning, hurried away in chains, and consigned to slavery and
excruciating torture. Some of these have had wives and children, depen-
dent on them for bread; but of this, no account was made. The right of the
hunter to his prey stands superior to the right of marriage, and to all rights
in this republic, the rights of God included! For black men there are neither
law, justice, humanity, nor religion. The Fugitive Slave Law makes MERCY
TO THEM, A CRIME; and bribes the judge who tries them. An American
JUDGE GETS TEN DOLLARS FOR EVERY VICTIM HE CONSIGNS to slavery, and
five, when he fails to do so. The oath of any two villains is sufficient, under
this hell-black enactment, to send the most pious and exemplary black man
into the remorseless jaws of slavery! His own testimony is nothing. He can
bring no witnesses for himself. The minister of American justice is bound
by the law to hear but one side; and that side, is the side of the oppressor.¹⁶Although the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law did not specify the number of witnesses needed to establish that an individual was a fugitive slave, it did provide that “in no trial or hearing . . . shall the testimony of such alleged fugitive be admitted in evidence." No provision was made for the alleged fugitive to bring forth witnesses who might dispute the claims of the court transcript or warrant, but the commissioner or judge did have to be convinced that the person brought before him was indeed the escaped slave described in the transcript. The Public Statutes at Large and Treaties of the United States of America, 1789-1873, 17 vols. (Boston, 1845-73), 9: 462-65; Campbell, Slave Catchers, 110-15.

Let this damning fact be perpetually told. Let it be thundered around the
world, that, in tyrant-killing, king-hating, people-loving, democratic,
Christian America, the seats of justice are filled with judges, who hold their
offices under an open and palpable bribe, and are bound, in deciding in the
case of a man’s liberty, to hear only his accusers!

In glaring violation of justice, in shameless disregard of the forms of
administering law, in cunning arrangement to entrap the defenceless, and
in diabolical intent, this Fugitive Slave Law stands alone in the annals of
tyrannical legislation. I doubt if there be another nation on the globe,
having the brass and the baseness to put such a law on the statute-book. If
any man in this assembly thinks differently from me in this matter, and
feels able to disprove my statements, I will gladly confront him at any
suitable time and place he may select.

RELIGIOUS LIBERTY.

I take this law to be one of the grossest infringements of Christian
Liberty, and, if the churches and ministers of our country were not stupidly
blind, or most wickedly indifferent, they, too, would so regard it.

At the very moment that they are thanking God for the enjoyment of
civil and religious liberty, and for the right to worship God according to the
dictates of their own consciences, they are utterly silent in respect to a law
which robs religion of its chief significance, and makes it utterly worthless
to a world lying in wickedness. Did this law concern the “mint, anise and
cummin”¹⁷Matt. 23: 23: “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For ye pay tithe of mint, anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy and faith; these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone."—abridge the right to sing psalms, to partake of the sacrament,
or to engage in any of the ceremonies of religion, it would be smitten by the
thunder of a thousand pulpits. A general shout would go up from the
church, demanding repeal, repeal, instant repeal! And it would go hard
with that politician who presumed to solicit the votes of the people without
inscribing this motto on his banner. Further, if this demand were not
complied with, another Scotland would be added to the history of religious
liberty, and the stern old Covenanters would be thrown into the shade. A
John Knox would be seen at every church door, and heard from every

pulpit, and Fillmore¹⁸President Millard Fillmore. would have no more quarter than was shown by
Knox, to the beautiful, but treacherous Queen Mary of Scotland.¹⁹Mary Stuart (1542-87). The fact
that the church of our country, (with fractional exceptions), does not es-
teem “the Fugitive Slave Law” as a declaration of war against religious
liberty, implies that that church regards religion simply as a form of wor—
ship, an empty ceremony, and not a vital principle, requiring active be-
nevolence, justice, love and good will towards man. It esteems sacriﬁce
above mercy; psalm-singing above right doing; solemn meetings above
practical righteousness. A worship that can be conducted by persons who
refuse to give shelter to the houseless, to give bread to the hungry, clothing
to the naked, and who enjoin obedience to a law forbidding these acts of
mercy, is a curse, not a blessing to mankind. The Bible addresses all such
persons as “scribes, pharisees, hypocrites, who pay tithe of mint, anise,
and cummin, and have omitted the weighter matters of the law, judgement,
mercy and faith. ”

THE CHURCH RESPONSIBLE.

But the church of this country is not only indifferent to the wrongs of
the slave, it actually takes sides with the oppressors. It has made itself the
bulwark of American slavery, and the shield of American slave-hunters.
Many of its most eloquent Divines, who stand as the very lights of the
church, have shamelessly given the sanction of religion and the Bible to the
whole slave system. They have taught that man may, properly, be a slave;
that the relation of master and slave is ordained of God; that to send back an
escaped bondman to his master is clearly the duty of all the followers of the
Lord Jesus Christ; and this horrible blasphemy is palmed off upon the world
for Christianity.

For my part, I would say, welcome inﬁdelity! welcome atheism! wel-
come anything! in preference to the gospel, as preached by those Divines!
They convert the very name of religion into an engine of tyranny, and
barbarous cruelty, and serve to confirm more inﬁdels, in this age, than all
the infidel writings of Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and Bolingbroke,²⁰Thomas Paine (1737-1809), American revolutionary writer; Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire (1694-1778), French essayist, playwright, and philosopher; and Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751), English statesman, orator, and essayist, criticized the established Protestant and Catholic churches, and espoused a form of “natural religion" or Deism, for which they often received the opprobrium of supporters of orthodox Christianity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Biographie Universelle, 49: 464-512; DNB, 17: 618-33; DAB, 14: 159-66. put

together, have done! These ministers make religion a cold and ﬂinty-
hearted thing, having neither principles of right action, nor bowels of
compassion. They strip the love of God of its beauty, and leave the throne
of religion a huge, horrible, repulsive form. It is a religion for oppressors,
tyrants, man-stealers, and thugs. It is not that “pure and undefiled reli-
gion” which is from above, and which is “ﬁrst pure, then peaceable, easy
to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and
without hypocrisy."²¹Douglass quotes from James 1: 27: “Pure religion and undefiled . . . is this. . . ," and 3: 17, “But the wisdom that is from above is ﬁrst pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be intreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality and without hypocrisy." But a religion which favors the rich against the poor;
which exalts the proud above the humble; which divides mankind into two
classes, tyrants and slaves; which says to the man in chains, stay there; and
to the oppressor, oppress on; it is a religion which may be professed and
enjoyed by all the robbers and enslavers of mankind; it makes God a
respecter of persons, denies his fatherhood of the race, and tramples in the
dust the great truth of the brotherhood of man. All this we affirm to be true
of the popular church, and the popular worship of our land and nation—a
religion, a church, and a worship which, on the authority of inspired
wisdom, we pronounce to be an abomination in the sight of God. In the
language of Isaiah, the American church might be well addressed, “Bring
no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me: the new moons
and Sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity.
even the solemn meeting. Your new moons and your appointed feasts my
soul hateth. They are a trouble to me; I am weary to bear them; and when ye
spread forth your hands I will hide mine eyes from you. Yea! when ye make
many prayers, I will not hear. YOUR HANDS ARE FULL OF BLOOD:
cease to do evil, learn to do well; seek judgement; relieve the oppressed;
judge for the fatherless; plead for the widow."²²Isa. 1: 13-17.

The American church is guilty, when viewed in connection with what
it is doing to uphold slavery; but it is superlatively guilty when viewed in
connection with its ability to abolish slavery.

The sin of which it is guilty is one of omission as well as of commis-
sion. Albert Barnes but uttered what the common sense of every man at all
observant of the actual state of the case will receive as truth, when he
declared that “There is no power out of the church that could sustain
slavery an hour, if it were not sustained in it."²³Presbyterian minister Albert Barnes (1798-1870) was born in Rome, New York, and graduated from Hamilton College, Clinton, New York, in 1820 and Princeton Theological Seminary in 1823. Appointed to the Presbyterian Church in Morristown, New Jersey, in 1824, Barnes in 1830 accepted an appointment at the First Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, where he remained for almost forty years. One of the leaders of the “New School" movement within the Presbyterian Church, supporting joint religious missionary activities with other denominations and more flexible interpretations of church doctrine, Barnes appeared “dangerous” to many Old School Presbyterians. In 1837 he was tried for heresy, though later acquitted. During the mid-1830s Barnes encountered a runaway slave at his church door. Using as his argument St. Paul's epistle that urged slaves to be dutiful to their masters, Bames refused to assist the fugitive and told him to return to his owner. The slave rejected the minister's suggestion and fled. After this attempt to uphold and justify the institution of slavery in the United States, Barnes became an “implacable foe of slavery." although he never ofﬁcially affiliated with any antislavery organization. Douglass quotes from Barnes's An Inquiry into the Scriptural Views of Slavery (Philadelphia, 1846), 383, in which Barnes argued that “the principles laid down by the Savior and his apostles, are such as are opposed to slavery, and if carried out would secure its universal abolition." In a later work, The Church and Slavery (Philadelphia, 1857), Barnes examined “What the church is doing, and what it ought to do, in reference to an evil so vast, and so perilous to all our institutions." E. Bradford Davis, “Albert Barnes, 1798—1870: An Exponent of New School Presbyterianism“ (Doctor of Theology diss., Princeton Theological Seminary, 1961), 276-330; C. Bruce Steiger, “Abolitionism and the Presbyterian Schism of 1837-1838,” MVHR, 36: 391-414 (December 1949); NCAB, 7: 360; DAB, 1: 627-629.

Let the religious press, the pulpit, the Sunday school, the conference
meeting, the great ecclesiastical, missionary, Bible and tract associations
of the land array their immense powers against slavery and slave-holding;
and the whole system of crime and blood would be scattered to the winds;
and that they do not do this involves them in the most awful responsibility
of which the mind can conceive.

In prosecuting the anti-slavery enterprise, we have been asked to spare
the church, to spare the ministry; but how, we ask, could such a thing be
done? We are met on the threshold of our efforts for the redemption of the
slave, by the church and ministry of the country, in battle arrayed against
us; and we are compelled to fight or flee. From what quarter, I beg to
know, has proceeded a fire so deadly upon our ranks, during the last two
years, as from the Northern pulpit? As the champions of oppressors, the
chosen men of American theology have appeared—men, honored for their
so-called piety, and their real learning. The LORDS²⁴John Chase Lord. of Buffalo, the
SPRINGS²⁵Gardiner Spring. of New York, the LATHROPS²⁶Leonard Elijah Lathrop. of Auburn, the COXES²⁷In a sermon preached in Brooklyn, New York, on Thanksgiving Day of 1850, the Reverend Samuel Hanson Cox reiterated his disapproval of slavery but urged obedience to the recently enacted Fugitive Slave Law. Taking as one of his texts 1 Pet. 2: 13-16, “Submit yourself to every ordinance of man for the Lord's sake," Cox denounced as “wicked and unchristian" those who urged northern blacks to resist the Fugitive Slave Law, and warned that “blood would flow in the streets" if the law were defied. At the same time, however, Cox expressed sympathy for the “colored population" and afﬁrmed his conviction that “black and white have one common origin. ” The duty of all Christians, as Cox saw it, was “to pray for the freedom of the slave, but not to force that freedom against principles of justice and in the face of the most fearful consequences." Visiting the South had given Cox a fuller appreciation of the “difﬁculties under which the slaveholders labored" in dealing with a “brutified, barbarous race" of “halfsavages." Convinced that “If the colored race is to be freed, it must be by their own masters," Cox personally favored purchasing the freedom of all southern slaves and was ready to impose a “heavy tax" for the purpose. New York Herald, 15 December 1850. and

SPENCERS²⁸Ichabod Smith Spencer. of Brooklyn, the GANNETS²⁹Rev. Ezra Stiles Gannett (1801-71), pastor of the Federal Street Church in Boston, often castigated radical abolitionists for their deﬁance of the law and their call for “immediate emancipation" because he believed such measures would lead to disunion. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to a longtime steward of Harvard College and the daughter of a former president of Yale College, Gannett attended Phillips Academy, Andover, and was graduated with honors from Harvard College in 1820. He completed Harvard Divinity School in 1823 and the following year accepted an appointment as assistant to Dr. William Ellery Channing of the Federal Street Church in Boston; after Channing's death in 1842, Gannett assumed the pastorate of the church and remained there the rest of his life. Gannett became one of the leaders of “old-fashioned Unitarianism" and exercised great inﬂuence through the editorship of several religious journals, including the Scriptural Interpreter (1831-35), Monthly Miscellany of Religion and Letters (1839-43), and Christian Examiner (1844-49). In a Thanksgiving Day sermon published in 1850 Gannett proclaimed, “God save us from disunion! I know that Slavery is a political and moral evil, a sin and curse; but disunion seems to me to be treason, not so much against the country, as against humanity." William C. Gannett, Ezra Stiles Gannett, Unitarian Minister in Boston: A Memoir (1875; Port Washington, N.Y., 1971), 287-88; Ezra Stiles Gannett, Thanksgiving For the Union: A Discourse Delivered in the Federal Meeting House, November 28, 1850 (Boston, 1850), 17; DAB, 7: 122-23. and SHARPS³⁰Daniel Sharp. of Boston, the
DEWEYS³¹Orville Dewey. of Washington, and other great religious lights of the land, have,
in utter denial of the authority of Him, by whom they professed to be called
to the ministry, deliberately taught us, against the example of the Hebrews
and against the remonstrance of the Apostles, they teach “that we ought to
obey man’s law before the law of God.”

My spirit wearies of such blasphemy; and how such men can be sup-
ported, as the “standing types and representatives of Jesus Christ,” is a
mystery which I leave others to penetrate. ln speaking of the American
church, however, let it be distinctly understood that I mean the great mass
of the religious organizations of our land. There are exceptions, and I thank
God that there are. Noble men may be found, scattered all over these
Northern States, of whom Henry Ward Beecher³²Henry Ward Beecher (1813-87), the fourth son of Presbyterian clergyman Lyman Beecher and brother of antislavery novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe, was the noted pastor of Brooklyn's Plymouth Church for forty years. After his graduation from Amherst College in 1834, Beecher studied at Lane Theological Seminary and served as pastor of Presbyterian churches in Lawrenceburg and Indianapolis, Indiana. before becoming minister at Plymouth Church in 1847. Committed to making the church an active instrument of social reform, Beecher in his sermons addressed the major social and political issues of his time with a force and drama that established him as one of the century's major orators. Though he denounced the evil of slavery, on occasion staging mock slave auctions in his church to impress his congregation with slavery's injustices, he denied that a constitutional basis existed for interfering with the institution in states where it already existed. Instead he urged that its exclusion from the territories would achieve abolition gradually and peacefully. His theology, minimizing doctrinal differences, stressed the religious worth of personal loyalty to Christ, and in 1882 he led his church out of the Congregational denomination. In addition to writing extensively for the secular press, Beecher edited the widely read religious journals New York Independent (1861-63) and Christian Union (1870-81). His reputation survived five years of public discussion that preceded the 1875 court trial and a subsequent Congregational council's examination of New York Congregational journalist Theodore Tilton's charge that an adulterous relation existed between his wife and Beecher. Marie Caskey, Chariot of Fire: Religion and the Beecher Family (New Haven, 1978), 208-48; Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, 1972), 739; NCAB, 3: 129-30; DAB, 2: 129-35. of Brooklyn, Samuel J.

May of Syracuse, and my esteemed friend^*Rev. R. R. Raymond. on the platform, are shining
examples; and let me say further, that upon these men lies the duty to
inspire our ranks with high religious faith and zeal, and to cheer us on in the
great mission of the slave‘s redemption from his chains.

RELIGION IN ENGLAND AND RELIGION IN AMERICA.

One is struck with the difference between the attitude of the American
church towards the anti-slavery movement, and that occupied by the
churches in England towards a similar movement in that country. There,
the church, true to its mission of ameliorating, elevating, and improving
the condition of mankind, came forward promptly, bound up the wounds of
the West Indian slave, and restored him to his liberty. There, the question
of emancipation was a high[ly] religious question. It was demanded, in the
name of humanity, and according to the law of the living God. The
Sharps,³³Granville Sharp. the Clarksons,³⁴Thomas Clarkson. the Wilberforces,³⁵William Wilberforce. the Buxtons,³⁶Thomas Fowell Buxton (1786-1845), politician, philanthropist, and successor to Wilberforce in the parliamentary struggle to end British slavery and the slave trade, was born in Essex County, England, and educated at Trinity College, Dublin. Buxton entered Parliament in 1818 and achieved prominence for his support of various reform measures, including education of the poor and equitable criminal laws. In the late 1820s he exposed the practice of slave trading in Mauritius, Trinidad, and Jamaica, and between 1831 and 1833 led the abolition campaign in Parliament. Buxton wrote The African Slave Trade and Its Remedy (London, 1839) and supported several unsuccessful explorations of the Niger River. Mathieson, British Slavery and its Abolition, 115-27, 194-98, 222-24; Klingberg, Anti-Slavery Movement in England, 187-212; Taylor, British and American Abolitionists, 33-34, 73-74; DNB, 3: 559-61. and Bur-
chells³⁷Thomas Burchell. and the Knibbs,³⁸William Knibb. were alike famous for their piety, and for their

philanthropy. The anti-slavery movement there was not an anti-church
movement, for the reason that the church took its full share in prosecuting
that movement: and the anti-slavery movement in this country will cease to
be an anti-church movement, when the church of this country shall assume
a favorable, instead of a hostile position towards that movement.

Americans! your republican politics, not less than your republican
religion, are flagrantly inconsistent. You boast of your love of liberty, your
superior civilization, and your pure Christianity, while the whole political
power of the nation (as embodied in the two great political parties), is
solemnly pledged to support and perpetuate the enslavement of three mil-
lions of your countrymen. You hurl your anathemas at the crowned headed
tyrants of Russia and Austria, and pride yourselves on your Democratic
institutions, while you yourselves consent to be the mere tools and body-
guards of the tyrants of Virginia and Carolina. You invite to your shores
fugitives of oppression from abroad, honor them with banquets, greet them
with ovations, cheer them, toast them, salute them, protect them, and pour
out your money to them like water; but the fugitives from your own land
you advertise, hunt, arrest, shoot and kill. You glory in your refinement
and your universal education; yet you maintain a system as barbarous and
dreadful as ever stained the character of a nation—a system begun in
avarice, supported in pride, and perpetuated in cruelty. You shed tears over
fallen Hungary, and make the sad story of her wrongs the theme of your
poets, statesmen and orators, till your gallant sons are ready to fly to arms
to vindicate her cause against her oppressors;³⁹Douglass here refers to the turmoil in Hungary following the invasion of the country by Russian and Austrian troops in August 1849. The Magyar-dominated Hungarian Diet in the spring of 1848, after the outbreak of revolution in Austria, seized the opportunity to enact a series of internal reforms, the “April Laws," which among other things created an independent Hungarian ministry. The ministry, however, was viewed as a direct threat to Austrian control, and in September 1848, with the support of Austrian King Ferdinand, Croatian troops invaded Hungary under the leadership of Josip Jelacic. The new ministry ﬂed, leaving in charge Magyar nationalist Louis Kossuth, who was eventually able to rout the Croatian forces. Francis Joseph, nephew of King Ferdinand of Austria, assumed the throne of Hungary in December 1848 and revoked the “April Laws." At this point the Hungarian Diet proclaimed its independence and Louis Kossuth became governor. The Hungarian republic was shortlived, however, and Francis Joseph, with the assistance of Russian troops, marched on Hungary and defeated the republican army in August 1849. The country was dismembered and brought under the control of Vienna. Janos Pragay, The Hungarian Revolution: Outlines of the Prominent Circumstances Attending the Hungarian Struggle for Freedom (New York, 1850); B. F. Tefft, Hungary and Kossuth: An American Exposition of the late Hungarian Revolution (Philadelphia, 1852); Edwin L. Godkin, The History of Hungary and the Magyars From the Earliest Period to the Close of the Late War (London, 1856), 324-69. but, in regard to the ten
thousand wrongs of the American slave, you would enforce the strictest

silence, and would hail him as an enemy of the nation who dares to make
those wrongs the subject of public discourse! You are all on fire at the
mention of liberty for France or for Ireland; but are as cold as an iceberg at
the thought of liberty for the enslaved of America. You discourse
eloquently on the dignity of labor; yet, you sustain a system which, in its
very essence, casts a stigma upon labor. You can bare your bosom to the
storm of British artillery to throw off a threepenny tax on tea; and yet wring
the last hard-earned farthing from the grasp of the black laborers of your
country. You profess to believe “that, of one blood, God made all nations
of men to dwell on the face of all the earth,⁴⁰A paraphrase of 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 commanded all
men, everywhere to love one another; yet you notoriously hate, (and glory
in your hatred), all men whose skins are not colored like your own. You
declare, before the world, and are understood by the world to declare, that
you “hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal;
and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; and that,
among these are, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;"⁴¹Douglass quotes the American Declaration of Independence. and yet, you
hold securely, in a bondage which, according to your own Thomas Jeffer-
son, “is worse than ages of that which your fathers rose in rebellion to
oppose,"⁴²Writing to Jean Nicholas Demeunier on 26 June 1786, Thomas Jefferson observed: “What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man! Who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment or death itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment be deaf to all those motives whose power supported him thro' his trial, and inﬂict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose." Boyd, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 10: 63. a seventh part of the inhabitants of your country.

Fellow-citizens! I will not enlarge further on your national inconsisten-
cies. The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as
a sham, your humanity as a base pretence, and your Christianity as a lie. It
destroys your moral power abroad; it corrupts your politicians at home. It
saps the foundation of religion; it makes your name a hissing, and a by-
word to a mocking earth. It is the antagonistic force in your government,
the only thing that seriously disturbs and endangers your Union. It fetters
your progress; it is the enemy of improvement, the deadly foe of education;
it fosters pride; it breeds insolence; it promotes vice; it shelters crime; it is a
curse to the earth that supports it; and yet, you cling to it, as if it were the
sheet anchor of all your hopes. Oh! be warned! be warned! a horrible reptile
is coiled up in your nation’s bosom; the venomous creature is nursing at the

tender breast of your youthful republic; for the love of God, tear away, and
ﬂing from you the hideous monster, and let the weight of twenty millions
crush and destroy it forever!

THE CONSTITUTION.

But it is answered in reply to all this, that precisely what I have now
denounced is, in fact, guaranteed and sanctioned by the Constitution of the
United States; that the right to hold and to hunt slaves is a part of that
Constitution framed by the illustrious Fathers of this Republic.

Then, I dare to affirm, notwithstanding all I have said before, your
fathers stooped, basely stooped

“To palter with us in a double sense:
And keep the word of promise to the ear,
But break it to the heart."⁴³Douglass paraphrases Macbeth, act 5. sc. 8, lines 20-22.

And instead of being the honest men I have before declared them to be,
they were the veriest imposters that ever practised on mankind. This is the
inevitable conclusion, and from it there is no escape. But I differ from those
who charge this baseness on the framers of the Constitution of the United
States. It is a slander upon their memory, at least, so I believe. There is not
time now to argue the constitutional question at length; nor have I the
ability to discuss it as it ought to be discussed. The subject has been handled
with masterly power by Lysander Spooner, Esq.,⁴⁴Lysander Spooner (1808-87), lawyer, writer, and uncompromising foe of slavery, first published his famous work, The Unconstitationality of Slavery, in Boston, in 1845. An expanded version appeared in 1847, and it became one of the major sources of campaign literature used by the Liberty party in the 1840s. ACAB, 5: 634-35; DAB, 17: 466-67. by William Goodell,⁴⁵Douglass probably refers to William Goodell, Views of American Constitutional Law, Its Bearing upon American Slavery (Utica, 1844), and idem, Slavery and Anti-Slavery,
by Samuel E. Sewall, Esq,⁴⁶Attorney Samuel E. Sewall (1799-1888) published in 1827 his Remarks on Slavery in the United States, which had ﬁrst appeared in the Christian Examiner. Although he wrote no lengthy legal analysis of American slavery, Sewall was active in the defense of fugitive slaves captured in Massachusetts and in 1843 ran for govemor of the state on the Liberty party ticket. Nina Moore Tiffany, Samuel E. Sewall: A Memoir (Boston, 1898), 33-81. and last, though not least, by Gerritt Smith,
Esq.⁴⁷Among Gerrit Smith’s many letters, tracts, and pamphlets denying the constitutionality of slavery are Letter of Gerrit Smith to Henry Clay (New York, 1839); Letter of Gerrit Smith to S. P. Chase on the Unconstitutionality of Every Part of American Slavery (Albany, 1847); Abstract of the Argument on the Fugitive Slave Law, Made by Gerrit Smith in Syracuse, June, 1852 on the Trial of Henry W. Allen, U.S. Deputy Marshal, for Kidnapping (Syracuse, 1852). These gentlemen have, as I think, fully and clearly vindicated the
Constitution from any design to support slavery for an hour.

Fellow-citizens! there is no matter in respect to which, the people of the
North have allowed themselves to be so ruinously imposed upon, as that of
the pro-slavery character of the Constitution. In that instrument I hold there
is neither warrant, license, nor sanction of the hateful thing; but, inter-
preted as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY
DOCUMENT. Read its preamble, consider its purposes. Is slavery among
them? Is it at the gateway? or is it in the temple? It is neither. While I do not
intend to argue this question on the present occasion, let me ask, if it be not
somewhat singular that, if the Constitution were intended to be, by its
framers and adopters, a slave-holding instrument, why neither slavery,
slaveholding, nor slave can anywhere be found in it. What would be
thought of an instrument, drawn up, legally drawn up, for the purpose of
entitling the city of Rochester to a track of land, in which no mention of
land was made? Now, there are certain rules of interpretation, for the
proper understanding of all legal instruments. These rules are well estab-
lished. They are plain, common-sense rules, such as you and I, and all of
us, can understand and apply. without having passed years in the study of
law. I scout the idea that the question of the constitutionality or unconstitu-
tionality of slavery is not a question for the people. I hold that every
American citizen has a right to form an opinion of the constitution, and to
propagate that opinion, and to use all honorable means to make his opinion
the prevailing one. Without this right, the liberty of an American citizen
would be as insecure as that of a Frenchman. Ex-Vice-President Dallas⁴⁸George Mifflin Dallas (1792-1864), Philadelphia-born lawyer and Democratic politician, served as U.S. vice-president (1845-49) under James Polk. Other political offices Dallas held during his public career included U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania (1829-31), U.S. senator (1831-33), Pennsylvania attorney general (1833-35), and U.S. minister to Russia (1837-39). Although retired to private law practice in 1849, he expressed his support for the Compromise of 1850 and its provisions for the return of fugitive slaves in a letter to Guy M. Bryan published in the New York Times, 13 October 1851. Denouncing “the self-slaughter of intermeddling with the institutions and rights exclusively of state creation,. state responsibility, and state control," Dallas observed that “the act for the extradition of fugitives is the pretext for protracted and persevering war upon the guarantees of the Constitution." As a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1852, Dallas was asked whether he would enforce the Fugitive Slave Law and he answered unequivocally “Yes, I would! " George Mifflin Dallas to Guy M. Bryan, 25 July 1851, in New York Daily Times, 13 October 1851; New York Daily Times, 31 May 1852; John M. Belohlavek, George Miflin Dallas: Jacksonian Patrician (University Park, Pa., 1977), 138-43; NCAB, 6: 268; BDAC, 772; DAB, 5: 38-39.
tells us that the constitution is an object to which no American mind can be
too attentive, and no American heart too devoted. He further says, the

constitution, in its words, is plain and intelligible, and is meant for the
home-bred, unsophisticated understandings of our fellow-citizens. Senator
Berrien⁴⁹Georgia senator John MacPherson Berrien (1781-1856), known as the “American Cicero" because of his magniﬁcent oratory, was also regarded as one of the ablest constitutional lawyers in the U.S. Senate during the 1840s. Born near Princeton, New Jersey, in 1781, he grew up in Savannah,. Georgia, was graduated from Princeton at age fourteen, returned to Savannah to study law, and was admitted to the bar in 1798. From 1809 until 1821 he served as solicitor and then as judge of the eastern circuit. A member of the Georgia state senate (1822-23) and the U.S. Senate (1823-25) and U.S. attorney general under Andrew Jackson in 1829, Berrien was returned to the Senate as a Whig in 1841 after a decade’s retirement from public life. In 1849 Berrien's Address to the People of the United States pleaded for compromise on the slavery question. He later voted in favor of the Fugitive Slave Law and opposed the abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia and the admission of California as a free state. Defeated in his bid for reelection in November 1851, he spent his final years organizing the American or Know-Nothing party. Josephine Mellichamp, Senators from Georgia (Huntsville, Ala., 1976), 99-103; Richard H. Shryock, Georgia and the Union in 1850 (Durham, NC, 1926), 157-63, 267-69, 358; BDAC, 548; DAB,2: 225-26. tells us that the Constitution is the fundamental law, that which
controls all others. The charter of our liberties, which every citizen has a
personal interest in understanding thoroughly. The testimony of Senator
Breese,⁵⁰Sidney Breese (1800-78), Democrat from Illinois, served in the U.S. Senate for only one term (1843-49) and generally supported the positions of his fellow midwestem senator, Lewis Cass, of Michigan, on such issues as the constitutionality of slavery, popular sovereignty, and limited congressional authority over slavery. Born into a wealthy family in Whitesboro, New York, and a graduate of Union College, Breese headed west to study in Illinois and was admitted to the bar in 1820. In 1857 he was elected to the Illinois Supreme Court and was reelected in 1861 and 1870, from which position he gained a reputation as one of the leading American jurists of the era. Melville W. Fuller, “Biographical Memoir of Sidney Breese, " in Sidney Breese, The Early History of Illinois, From Its Discovery by the French., in 1763. . . , ed. Thomas Hoyne (Chicago, 1884), 3-60; ACAB, 1: 367; NCAB, 8: 122; DAB, 3: 14-16. Lewis Cass, and many others that might be named, who are
everywhere esteemed as sound lawyers, so regard the constitution. I take it,
therefore, that it is not presumption in a private citizen to form an opinion of
that instrument.

Now, take the constitution according to its plain reading, and I defy the
presentation of a single pro-slavery clause in it. On the other hand it will be
found to contain principles and purposes, entirely hostile to the existence of
slavery.

I have detained my audience entirely too long already. At some future
period I will gladly avail myself of an opportunity to give this subject a full
and fair discussion.

Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I
have this day presented of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this
country. There are forces in operation, which must inevitably work the
downfall of slavery. “The arm of the Lord is not shortened,"⁵¹Douglass paraphrases Isa. 59: l: “Behold, the Lord's hand is not shortened, that it cannot save, neither His ear heavy, that it cannot hear." and the

doom of slavery is certain. I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope.
While drawing encouragement from the Declaration of Independence, the
great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions, my
spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age. Nations do not
now stand in the same relation to each other that they did ages ago. No
nation can now shut itself up from the surrounding world, and trot round in
the same old path of its fathers without interference. The time was when
such could be done. Long established customs of hurtful character could
formerly fence themselves in, and do their evil work with social impunity.
Knowledge was then confined and enjoyed by the privileged few, and the
multitude walked on in mental darkness. But a change has now come over
the affairs of mankind. Walled cities and empires have become unfashion-
able. The arm of commerce has borne away the gates of the strong city.
Intelligence is penetrating the darkest comers of the globe. It makes its
pathway over and under the sea, as well as on the earth. Wind, steam, and
lightning are its chartered agents. Oceans no longer divide, but link nations
together. From Boston to London is now a holiday excursion. Space is
comparatively annihilated. Thoughts expressed on one side of the Atlantic
are distinctly heard on the other.

The far off and almost fabulous Pacific rolls in grandeur at our feet.
The Celestial Empire, the mystery of ages, is being solved. The fiat of the
Almighty, “Let there be Light,"⁵²Gen. 1 :3. has not yet spent its force. No abuse, no
outrage whether in taste, sport or avarice, can now hide itself from the
all-pervading light. The iron shoe, and crippled foot of China must be seen,
in contrast with nature. Africa must rise and put on her yet unwoven
garment. “Ethiopia shall stretch out her hand unto God. "⁵³An allusion to Ps. 68: 31: “Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God." In the fervent
aspirations of William Lloyd Garrison, I say, and let every heart join in
saying it:

God speed the year of jubilee
The wide world o’er!
When from their galling chains set free,
Th’ oppress’d shall vilely bend the knee,
And wear the yoke of tyranny
Like brutes no more.
That year will come, and freedom’s reign,
To man his plundered rights again
Restore.

God speed the day when human blood
Shall cease to flow!
In every clime be understood,
The claims of human brotherhood,
And each return for evil, good,
Not blow for blow;
That day will come all feuds to end,
And change into a faithful friend
Each foe.

God speed the hour, the glorious hour,
When none on earth
Shall exercise a lordly power,
Nor in a tyrant’s presence cower;
But all to manhood’s stature tower,
By equal birth!
THAT HOUR WILL COME, to each, to all,
And from his prison-house, the thrall
Go forth.

Until that year, day, hour, arrive,
With head, and heart, and hand I’ll strive,
To break the rod, and rend the gyve,
The spoiler of his prey deprive—
So witness Heaven!
And never from my chosen post,
Whate’er the peril or the cost,
Be driven.⁵⁴William Lloyd Garrison, “The Triumph of Freedom,” in Lib., 10 January 1845.

Creator

Douglass, Frederick, 1818-1895

Date

1852-07-05

Publisher

Yale University Press 1982

Type

Speeches

Publication Status

Published