Agriculture and Black Progress: An Address Delivered in Nashville, Tennessee, on September 18, 1873
AGRICULTURE AND BLACK PROGRESS:
AN ADDRESS DELIVERED IN NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE,
ON 18 SEPTEMBER 1873
New National Era, 18 September 1873. Other texts in Nashville Republican Banner, 19
September 1873; Nashville Union and American, 19 September 1873; Address Delivered by
Hon. Frederick Douglass, at the Third Annual Fair of the Colored Agricultural and Me-
chanical Association, on Thursday, September 18, 1873, at Nashville, Tennessee (Wash-
ington, DC, 1873); Speech File, reel 14, frames 654-65, reel 32, frames 541-51, FD
Papers, DLC.
Frederick Douglass’s appearance at the third annual fair of the Tennessee
Colored Agricultural and Mechanical Association in Nashville on 18 Sep-
tember 1873 was the highlight of six days of exhibitions, competitions, and
sports events that drew blacks from as far away as Memphis. On 17 September
a special delegation met Douglass’s train at nearby Gallatin en route from
Louisville, Kentucky. where he had briefly visited that city’s exposition and
been toasted by the local Democratic press. By mayoral decree the day of
Douglass’s speech was a “colored holiday.” A massive procession, led by the
Sons of Relief, accompanied Douglass to the fairgrounds amphitheater,
where as many as five thousand people, including an ex—governor, assembled.
The Association’s secretary, Abram Smith, introduced Douglass, who, ac-
cording to the Republican Banner, spoke “under great disadvantage”: the sun
was in his eyes and the audience lacked the attentiveness and respect that he
had grown accustomed to receiving from northern black assemblies. “I found
myself better appreciated by the whites than my own people at Nashville,” he
later lamented to Gerrit Smith, undoubtedly referring to press commentary
that his address “cannot be too widely disseminated among his race.” This
was an unlikely problem given that the orator had come prepared with thou-
sands of copies in pamphlet form. Douglass fared better the following day
when he briefly addressed students at Fisk University, was favorably received
by Governor Brown, and rendered his “Self-Made Man” speech to an atten-
tive audience of about two thousand at the fair’s exhibition building. See
Appendix A, text 10, for précis of alternate texts. Nashville Republican
Banner, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21 September 1873; Nashville Union and American,
14, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21 September 1873; NNE, 2 October 1873; Louisville
(Ky.) Commercial, 23 April 1873; Douglass to Gerrit Smith, 26 September
1873, Gerrit Smith Papers, NSyU.
Fellow-citizens and Gentlemen: When I had the honor to receive your kind
and unexpected invitation to visit Nashville, a city famous for its elegance
and refinement, and the scene of so many thrilling events and patriotic
associations during the late struggle for Union and liberty, I was naturally
enough very much pleased with the prospect of being present on this
occasion, but when I was informed that my visit was not to be either for
pleasure or observation, but to make an address, and that the said address
must be of a character appropriate to this your third annual agricultural
exhibition, my joy and enthusiasm received a very decided check; the
“native hue of resolution was sicklied over with the pale cast of thought."1Douglass quotes Hamlet, act 3, sc. 1, lines 84-85.
The fact is—and I am not ashamed to admit it—I felt very much as some of
our generals did when called upon to face the enemy on the open field of
battle. I would have gladly been relieved of the command, and to have
allowed the imposing task assigned me to fall into other and more compe-
tent hands. But your committee was composed of earnest and resolute men.
They were men from Tennessee, and as willful as old Hickory himself.2Andrew Jackson, whose nickname derived from the popular belief that he was tough as hickory. Albert R. Frey, Sobriquets and Nicknames (Boston, 1888), 257.
They made no account of any modest distrusts of my ability, would bear
none of my excuses, and in short would be satisfied with nothing less than
my presence and speech, on this occasion. Well, gentlemen, these willful
men have succeeded; they have got me here, but I beg you to remember the
old saying, which must have originated with farmers, for the best things
always have originated with them, that “one man may carry a horse to
water, but twenty cannot make him drink.”3This proverb can be traced back to John Heywood, The Proverbs and Epigrams of John Heywood (1562 and 1566; New York, 1967), 27.
The ground of my hesitation about coming here was not the cholera,
for Nashville is now tolerably healthy;4A cholera epidemic that besieged Nashville in 1873 reached its peak of virulence in mid-June. As many as 700 people died, but blacks suffered disproportionately, accounting for 430 of the 697 deaths reported between 7 June and 10 July alone. The resultant panic caused thousands to flee the city. ACC, 1873, 729; Jesse C. Burt, Nashville: Its Life and Times (Nashville, 1959), 73. it was not the distance I would have
to travel to get here, for your railway communications are nearly equal to
any in the country, but the trouble was the address, the appropriate ad-
dress. There was the rub.5An allusion to Hamlet, act 3, sc. 1, line 65. It was the rub then and it is the rub now, and
instead of disappearing on my approach it is all the more perplexing when I
look out upon this expectant multitude, and remember the high-sounding
praises heaped upon me in anticipation of my coming.
Gentlemen, this is an agricultural and mechanical industrial fair. I am
surrounded to-day by industrious mechanics and farmers, and you have got
me up here to tell you what I know about farming. Now, I am neither a
farmer nor a mechanic. During the last thirty-five years I have been actively
employed in a work which left me no time to study either the theory or the
practice of farming. I could far more easily tell you what I don’t know
about farming than what I do know, though the former would take more
time to tell it than the latter. Well, gentlemen, I do not mean to censure your
excellent committee for paying me in advance and insisting upon my
coming, thus buying a pig in a bag,6An earlier version of this phrase, “I will never bye the pyg in the poke," appears in Heywood, Proverbs and Epigrams, 139. not knowing what kind of an animal
would come forth at the time, but I am bold to say that they violated in that
act one of the first rules of successful farming, which is to see that the tools
are always placed in the hands that can use them best. There are, undoubt-
edly, hundreds of colored men in the vicinity of Nashville, practical farm-
ers and mechanics, who could address you upon the subjects of this occa-
sion far more appropriately and effectively than I can do. This suggestion
may seem rather late, but it may serve you a good turn when the business of
selecting a speaker shall come round again.
But, gentlemen, there is a sunnier side to this distressing picture. Since
I am now here, and there is no possible way of escape, I may at least
employ the device of the boy who whistled in the graveyard to keep up his
courage. Several considerations serve in some measure to reconcile me to
my task. One of these is the fact that being a public speaker, I have often
found myself in just such embarrassing situations at other times and places.
If you will pardon me a little autobiography and, perhaps, a little
egotism, as well, I will tell you, that like many other men, I have been all
my life long doing extraordinary things for the first time, some of which
had been better undone. I have been constantly required to undertake the
performance of works which came upon me as a surprise, and for which I
had no previous training or preparation, and while my work has generally
been rather unskillfully and imperfectly done, I have always had a
thoughtful and generous people for my judges, who have measured and
estimated my achievements not by the rule of intrinsic excellence, but by
the rule of my disadvantages, and have thus often accorded me higher
praise than I could possibly claim on the score of merit.
Besides this, there is encouragement in the subject itself. Agriculture is
one of the very oldest themes, and one upon which only a genius can he
expected to say anything either new or striking. Originality is out of the
question. The knowledge already accumulated and recorded on this subject
is vast and minute, and the man who can give but a glimpse of one of the
many sides of this vast accumulation of knowledge does not speak in vain.
In few things, perhaps, more than in farming, does one find that there
is nothing new under the sun.7Eccles, 1: 9. The sages of to-day do but reiterate the
wisdom of the sages of antiquity. The perception of truth may be new or
old, but the truth itself is neither old nor new, but eternal as the Universe.
The discovery of the fundamental principles of Agriculture reach far be-
yond the limits of authentic history, for men tilled the soil long before they
wrote books, and would never have written books if they had not tilled the
soil. All the present rests upon all the past. The very best that.any in my
circumstances can do is to teach and preach the discoveries made by other
men and at other times.
There are doubtless many great truths which yet remain to be dis-
covered and applied to Agriculture, as well as to many other matters of
human welfare. It was a favorite saying of Theodore Parker, that “all the
space between man’s mind and God’s mind is crowded with truths which
wait to be discovered and organized into law for the practice of men."
But mankind is so nearly on a level of equality that no one man may
claim the exclusive merit of original discovery. Truth, like the gentle light
of Heaven, usually dawns upon more than one mind at the same time, so
that there is seldom a discovery which has not more than one to claim the
honor of it.
Gentlemen, I find still another source of encouragement. It is in the
terms you employ in announcing my subject to-day. I am to speak to you of
the importance of agricultural and mechanical industry and of united effort
on the part of our people to improve their physical, moral, and social
condition. Upon a subject so broad and comprehensive and deeply interest-
ing it would be almost impossible to speak without saying something
capable of being turned to use by sensible people.
Now, gentlemen, having looked out for myself, always an important
lesson, and one which farmers readily learn, let me attend to you. I give
you my warmest congratulations, first of all, upon the attitude you have
assumed before the American people this day. I especially congratulate you
upon the noble example you have set for our whole race. You have gone to
work like earnest men, fully believing in the future of your people. You
have wisely availed yourselves of a well-known power, the power of asso-
ciation, organization, mutual counsel and cooperation. You have dared to
organize an Agricultural and Mechanical Association for the State of Ten-
nessee. You propose to avail yourselves of whatever knowledge or wisdom
there may be in this State, which can assist you in the work of your general
improvement. You have dared to open here, in the city of Nashville, a State
Agricultural Fair, to display the rich fruits of your industry, and to ask your
fellow-countrymen, of all conditions and colors, to view and inspect them.
This is an act, on your part, as brave as it is wise. It proves that you are not
ashamed of your achievements. It proves that you, like the great Oliver
Cromwell and all other brave men, want to be painted as you are, and to
receive no other or higher credit than that which you honestly win by open
and fair competition.
The organization of your State Agricultural Society, and this third
annual exhibition, demonstrate that you appreciate the new order of things
which has dawned upon the country. By these two signs you advertise and
inform the world of your farewell, your departure forever from the moral
and intellectual stagnation of a by-gone condition, and have taken up your
line of march under the banner of liberty with the more advanced peoples of
the earth to higher plains of civilization, culture, and refinement.
I congratulate you again, gentlemen, upon the point of time at which
you begin your public career of agricultural industry. In this respect the
conditions of success are nearly perfect. You have taken the tide at its
flood.8Douglass adapts Julius Caesar, act 4, sc. 3, line 295. You start in the full blaze of the accumulated wisdom of ages. No
fifty years of human life and exertion have been so crowded with discovery
and invention as the first half of this nineteenth century. You may now walk
by sight where others only walked by faith. You have not to feel your way
in the dark, or to hew out any new road to fortune. The very elements
around you have been fighting on your side, and, like a fortunate general,
you came upon the field of action at exactly the right moment to secure an
easy victory. Agricultural implements of world-approved materials and of
world-approved patterns are ready to your hand. The toil and drudgery of
ancient farming have been banished from the field. The heavy cradle which
wore out your manhood, and the sickle which bent your bodies in pain,
belong to a by-gone age. The old-fashioned hoe, broad, heavy, and cum-
brous; and the wooden plow, with its miserable mold-board, and its so-
called steel point, that kept you always running to the blacksmith’s shop,
have followed the sickle and the cradle to their common resting-place.9Innovations in technology, especially the application of horsepower to most farm tasks, and in marketing and distributing that technology to skeptical farmers characterized American agriculture during the half-century preceding Douglass's remarks. The period began with improvements in hand instruments, such as the “American cradle" that displaced the sickle. By midcentury there was both a significant increase in patented agricultural implements and machinery and a rise in real investment in farm machinery. Mechanical reapers, such as those patented by Obed Hussey and Cyrus H. McCormick in the 1830s, ultimately replaced the cradle and sickle; by the 1850s they had been sufficiently perfected to allay fears regarding their reliability and productivity. The wooden plows still in use when Douglass spoke were hand-crafted and had iron shares with hardened steel points on wooden moldboards. They were gradually replaced by cast iron plows, which as much as halved the expenditure of labor. Experimentation with lighter-weight, though fragile, steel moldboards began as early as 1837, their practicality impeded by the state of the art of metallurgy. By 1873, chilled iron plows had only recently entered the market. Clarence H. Danhof, Change in Agriculture: The Northern United States. 1820—1870 (Cambridge, Mass., 1969), 181-99, 228-37; M. C. Horine, “Farming by Machine." in Waldemar Kaempffert, ed., A Popular History of American Invention, 2 vols. (New York, 1924), 2: 246-309; William H. Clark, Farms and Farmers: The Story of American Agriculture (Boston, 1945), 175-91; Paul W. Gates, The Farmer's Age: Agriculture, 1815—1860 (New York, 1960), 279-83; Lewis Cecil Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860, 2 vols. (1933; New York, 1941), 2: 792-99; Merritt Finley Miller, The Evolution of Reaping Machines (Washington, D.C., 1902), 7-11, 22.
Science, the noblest and grandest artificer of human fortune and well-
being, the source and explanation of all progress, has patiently unfolded
the nature and composition of plants, and made us acquainted with the
properties of the common earth, wherever they grow. The quality of soil,
best suited to a given class of plants, has been accurately ascertained. The
chemical properties of various kinds of manure have been thoroughly
investigated.1010. American farmers were already interested in improving soil fertilization when Justus von Liebig‘s Organic Chemistry in Its Applications to Agriculture and Physiology (1840) revolutionized agricultural chemistry. Liebig’s explanation of plant nutrition in terms of soil minerals along with the correlate ideas of manures as sources of inorganic elements and a deficiency concept of soil spread rapidly in the United States, especially after their popularization by agricultural editors. A craze for soil analysis developed, inflamed both by advertisements by quacks for cheap analyses and by the wellintentioned services offered by academic proponents of the new theories at such scientific institutions as the Yale Analytical Laboratory. Although this craze had diminished by the early 1850s, continued fertilizer frauds inspired a comparable interest in fertilizer analysis. A leader in this movement, Samuel W. Johnson, published two popular textbooks, How Crops Grow: A Treatise on the Chemical Composition, Structure, and Life of the Plant (1868) and How Crops Feed: A Treatise on the Atmosphere and the Soil as Related to the Nutrition of Agricultural Plants (1870), both of which projected a future for "soil physics," the physical chemistry of soil and plant nutrition. Not long before Douglass spoke, the recently created Division of Chemistry in the U.S. Department of Agriculture began to pay increasing interest to soil analysis and fertilization. Margaret W. Rossiter, The Emergence of Agricultural Science: Justus Liebig and the Americans, 1840—1880 (New Haven, 1975); Richard A. Bradfield, “Liebig and the Chemistry of the Soil," in Forest Ray Moulton, ed., Liebig and After Liebig: A Century of Progress in Agricultural Chemistry (Washington, D.C., 1942), 48-55. Even weather, hitherto supposed to be hidden in the inscrutable
bosom of infinity, and only known to God, has been compelled to
give up its mystery. Instead of being governed by any supposed supreme
will, or controlled by the wishes and prayers of men, it is subject to and acts
in accordance with eternal and irreversible laws. “Old Probabilities,” as
the commissioner of this department is called, with his nerves of wire,
extending all over the country, is able to tell us daily and in advance what
storms are in the skies, and when and where they may be expected to
descend.11Nineteenth-century meteorologists studied storm phenomena, barometric pressure, and weather change and developed the synoptic map to synthesize their information as they attempted to explain complex weather patterns. Weather observation and prediction, however, were restricted to the recording and collection of data until the development of telegraphy, Douglass‘s “nerves of wire," which allowed for simultaneous weather observation. In 1846 Joseph Henry, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, organized the nation’s first system of weather observation for the purpose of storm warnings. By 1860, five hundred volunteers telegraphed reports that were condensed into a daily synoptic map published by many newspapers. This network was a foundation for the system later developed by “Old Prob," Cleveland Abbe. Abbe (1838-1916) was born in New York and received B.A. and M.A. degrees from the College of the City of New York in 1857 and 1860, respectively. After studying astronomy under the German astronomer F. F. E. Brϋnow at the University of Michigan, Abbe served as an aide to Benjamin Gould, superintendent of the coast survey, during the Civil War. After two years in residence at the Observatory of Pulkowa in Russia and a brief tenure at the Naval Observatory he became director of the Cincinnati Observatory in 1868. There he successfully initiated a project for the collection and publication of simultaneous climatological observations and warnings. These observations and “probabilities” (“forecasts”), published in the Cincinnati Weather Bulletin, were the nation's first weather predictions based upon daily telegraphic reports and synoptic maps. Appointed special assistant at the Washington office of the Weather Service of the U.S. Signal Service in 1871, Abbe published tridaily reports and forecasts through the Associated Press under the rubric “Old Prob," the sobriquet by which, along with “Old Probabilities," he came to be known. He remained with the Weather Service, later the Weather Bureau, until shortly before his death. Donald R. Whitnak, A History of the United States Weather Bureau (Urbana, Ill., 1961), 11-128; Patrick Hughes, A Century of Weather Service: A History of the Birth and Growth of the National Weather Service, 1870—1970 (New York, 1970), 19-24; Truman Abbe, Professor Abbe . . . and the Isobars: The Story of Cleveland Abbe, America’s First Weatherman (New York, 1955); ACAB, 1: 2; NCAB, 8: 264-65; DAB, 1: 1-2. There is light everywhere, and darkness nowhere. We have only
to open our eyes and to behold all around us the essential conditions of
successful exertion.
I have spoken of the impossibility of presenting anything original upon
this subject. In reading the works of modern writers, it is surprising to find
how much and how far we have been anticipated by those who have gone
before us in the field of thought and discovery. Most that we have done in
modern times has been, after all, to find new applications of old principles.
The plow, though vastly improved, is the same implement known by that
name thousands of years ago. Deep plowing and draining, and a thorough
pulverization of the soil, so earnestly and eloquently insisted upon nowa-
days, and very wisely so, though now better accomplished by means of our
better tools than at any previous time, especially in England, were well
known to the cultivators of the soil in China and Japan centuries ago. The
Egyptians even deified Orisin, the inventor of the plow.12Douglass may be referring to Osiris, who in Egyptian mythology was god of the Underworld, source of the knowledge of agriculture, and originally associated with fertility. Catherine B. Avery, ed., The New Century Classical Handbook (New York, 1962), 797; Oxford Classical Dictionary, 760. The small farm
theory, by which a man may double the number of his acres, by skillful and
thorough cultivation, and one which has been so eloquently and per-
sistently advocated by the lamented Horace Greeley, was by no means a
new idea, or in any sense original with him.13Agricultural theorists and critics gave careful consideration to ratios of land, labor, and capital, many speaking out against owning too much land. ldle land was alternately thought of as an investment or as an income drain, and some were convinced of the inability to cultivate large holdings as advantageously as small units. Horace Greeley, himself a satisfied small farmer on weekends, was not dogmatic in his preference, although he believed the skills requisite for the management of larger farms to be uncommon. To skeptics who claimed otherwise, he argued that small farms could be profitable with the application of proper improvements and the cultivation of suitable and marketable commodities such as vegetables and poultry. A friend and contributor to Greeley’s Tribune was Edmund Morris (1804-74) a well-known proponent of small farming and author of the widely read Ten Acres Enough. Horace Greeley, What I Know of Farming: A Series of Brief and Plain Expositions of Practical Agriculture as an Art Based Upon Science (New York, 1871), 292-97; Earl D. Ross. “Horace Greeley and the Beginnings of the New Agriculture," Agricultural History, 7: 3-17 (January 1933); Dankof, Change in Agriculture, 138-39; J. Parton, The Life of Horace Greeley, Editor of the New York Tribune (New York, 1855), 379-82; Edmund Morris, Ten Acres Enough: A Practical Experience, Showing How a Very Small Farm May Be Made to Keep a Very Large Family (New York, 1864); Gates, Farmer's Age, 344. Cato, two thousand years
ago, held and advocated precisely the same idea.14Marcus Porcius Cato (234-149 B.C.), born of plebcian stock at Tusculum, was a Roman statesman and general whose many writings included a handbook on husbandry, De Agri Cultura. Alan E. Astin, Cato the Censor (Oxford, 1978), 182—210, 240—66; Avery, New Classical Handbook, 262. The wisdom of this
theory may be appropriately commended on this occasion. The principle
underlying the small farm theory is very easily comprehended. Everybody
knows that distance is an element to be considered in farming and in much
other work. As much time and labor are required to walk, plow, or drive
over one acre of poor ground as over one acre of rich ground, while the
poor acre will give you only half the production of the rich one, and that an
article of inferior quality. In the one case you are but half paid for your toil,
while in the other you reap an abundant reward both in quantity and in
quality.
The same principle, as l have said, operates elsewhere. Talking with
Mr. William Whipper,15William Whipper (1804-76) was born in Little Britain, Pennsylvania, but in the 1820s moved to Philadelphia, where his involvement with the city's free black community brought him prominence. Whipper’s early politics combined issues of moral reform with a hostility toward colonization, migration, and all forms of color discrimination. He helped to found the American Moral Reform Society and was editor of its organ, the National Reformer. In I835 he moved to Columbia, Pennsylvania, where he operated a successful lumber business and became involved in the operation of the Underground Railroad. He later modified some of his political positions as he became interested in Canada as a haven for blacks and associated himself with organizations like Philadelphia’s Institute for Colored Youth. Success marked his later years as he acquired properties in Philadelphia, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and Dresden, Ontario; an estate valued at $108,000 in 1870; and a reputation that brought him to the management of the Philadelphia office of the Freedman‘s Bank. Richard P. McCormick, "William Whipper: Moral Reformer," PaH, 43: 23-46 (January 1976); Wilhelmina S. Robinson, Historical Negro Biographies (New York, 1967), 143; DANB, 643. a successful lumber merchant in the city of Phila-
delphia, he told me, he could not afford to keep a single piece of inferior
lumber in his yard, and the reason he assigned for keeping only the very
best quality of lumber, was that land was too dear and rents too high, to be
occupied by anything of inferior quality. Besides, said he, a poor stick of
timber will occupy as much space, and require as many hands and as much
labor to handle it, as would a superior article, while it would only com-
mand half the price. I came to the conclusion in listening to this reasoning,
that I had met in Mr. Whipper a wise man as well as a successful man, one
who practically carried out the idea that whatever is worth doing at all is
worth being done well.
Gentlemen, I would like to make a speech to-day of the orthodox
agricultural pattern. I would like to tell you of the wise things said and done
in respect to ancient and modern tillage. Neither you nor I can afford to be
ignorant of the facts of this history, for knowledge is power, here as
elsewhere, and there is no danger that we shall know too much about any
useful employment. There is for us in the agricultural history of the world a
special cause for complacency. If to the race to which we belong mankind
can ascribe any glory, the achievements upon which it is founded stretch far
away into the past. It is pleasant to know, that in color, form, and features,
we are related to the first successful tillers of the soil; to the people who
taught the world agriculture; that the civilization which made Greece,
Rome, and Western Europe illustrious, and even now makes our own land
glorious, sprung forth from the bosom of Africa. For, while this vast
continent was yet undiscovered by civilized men; while the Briton and the
Gallic races wandered like beasts of prey in the forests, the people of Egypt
and Ethiopia rejoiced in well cultivated fields and in abundance of corn. I
follow only the father of history16Herodotus. when I say that the ancient Egyptians
were black and their hair woolly. However this may be disputed now, there
is no denying that these people more nearly resembled the African type
than the Caucasian.
I would like to dwell here on the progress of agriculture, and note the
causes which have led to its rapid development in this country; show how
diversified labor produces a home market for the productions of our soil;
how the prosecution of internal improvements of rivers and harbors, of
canals, railroads and steam-navigation have stimulated agricultural indus-
try; how science, observation and experiment have assisted in its general
development; and especially would it be pleasant to comply with the letter
as well as the spirit of your invitation, dwell upon the general importance of
this branch of industry; picture to you the midnight gloom and destitution
which would fall upon the world if its wheels should cease to evolve, and
the earth refuse food for man and beast; how commerce would languish,
how mechanical machinery would gradually become silent; how the iron
horse would stand still on the track; how the fire would die out on the
hearth, the gaunt and withered arms of the mother hang down in despair;
the wan babe in the cradle sleep its last sleep, and the busy hopeful,
courageous and joyous world sink back again into the depths and darkness
of barbarism. It would be well enough, too, if there were time, to give you
the testimony of poets, scholars, statesmen and philosophers of all coun-
tries and ages in favor of country life; to follow, especially, the retiring
statesman, when worn and broken by the storms of public life, or when
covered with its honors, to the old farm of his birth, and paint the scene of
peace and sweet content in which he spends his declining years, and, at
last, sinks to rest forever; to dwell at large upon the soothing charms of
nature, the honest affection and trust of well-treated domestic animals, to
prove that among the truly beautiful and healthy scenes of this world, there
is none more beautiful than a well-managed farm.
But, gentlemen, this is an opportunity too unusual, an occasion too
peculiar, and my relation to you is too singular, to make such a disposition
of your time justifiable.
Mine, to-day, is a rare privilege. No man perhaps was ever called upon
to address so vast a concourse of newly-emancipated people; a people wide
awake and just starting in the race of mental, moral and social progress; a
people of whom, heretofore, no reckoning was made; a people recognized
as standing outside of the circle, and ranked by the laws of the land with
horses, sheep, and swine, and like these to be held and bought and sold.
Gentlemen, since this is our first meeting since the revolution, in your
situation and mine, I feel less like dwelling on agriculture in general than in
calling upon you to join me in loud, earnest, joyous and long-continued
cheers over our newly-gained freedom. Agricultural industry to-day has an
interest for me mainly in respect to the new order of things upon which we
have now fairly entered. How can it be made to serve us, as a particular
class, is the commanding question of the hour.
If we look abroad over our country and observe the condition of the
colored people, we shall find their greatest want to be regular and lucrative
employments for their energies. They have secured their freedom, it is true,
but not the friendship and favor of the people around them. The sentiment
that greeted them all over the South, when their fetters were broken, was:
let the negro starve! Happily to-day that sentiment is seldom heard, but
though seldom heard—I am sorry to say—it is still felt, and is active in a
thousand ways to our hurt. It keeps back the wages of the black laborer by
fraud; it refuses to rent and sell land; it excludes them from printers’ unions
and other mechanical associations; it refuses to teach them trades, and
shuts them out from all respectable employments, and consoles itself with
the theory that the negroes—like the Indians—will ultimately die out.
The effect of this ruling in the American mind has driven the negroes in
great numbers from the country into the large cities, and into menial
positions, where they easily learn to imitate the vices and follies of the least
exemplary whites, and they perish as a consequence. “Let the negro
starve!” thus executes itself.
In these circumstances, I hail agriculture as a refuge for the oppressed.
The grand old earth has no prejudices against race, color, or previous
condition of servitude, but flings open her ample breast to all who will
come to her for succor and relief. Agriculture is simply the act of cultivat-
ing the ground so as to secure its largest and best product for sustaining life
and health. There are special and pressing reasons why we, of all the
people of the United States, should master this great art. It is our last resort,
and if we fail here I see not how we can succeed elsewhere. We are not like
the Irish, an organized political power, welded together by a common
faith. We are not shrewd like the Hebrew, capable of making fortunes by
buying and selling old clothes. We are not like the Germans, who can spend
half their time in lager beer saloons and still get rich; but we are just what
we are: a laborious, joyous, thoughtless, improvident people, just released
from our thraldom, and with just such necessities as agricultural life will
secure.
I have already referred generally to the favorable conditions afforded to
successful agriculture on our part. Besides land, labor, and skill, there must
be heat, moisture, and manure. While man is required to eat bread in the
sweat of his brow, nature must give us warmth and moisture, or there is no
bread. In the farthest North, where cold, ice, and snow are perpetual, and
in the far South, under a vertical sun, where the fierce heat drinks up all the
moisture and leaves the land a sandy desert, agriculture, of course, in such
lands and latitudes is impossible.
Happily for us, we have no such heat and no such cold to contend with
here. In this respect there is no country in the world more highly favored
than the United States, and it would be hard to point to any State more
favorable to farming than your own great State of Tennessee. You have
mountain, valley, river, and plain, heat and moisture, and a beautifully
temperate climate, where, with knowledge, skill, and industry, you may
obtain the highest agricultural results.
Some of your old citizens, no doubt, continue to regret the change
which has taken place in the relations of the people of Tennessee. In the loss
of slavery the State, in their estimation, has parted with the source of its
happiness and prosperity. To my mind it would be hard to find a greater
mistake than this. Emancipation in this State was not only a triumph of
justice, but a triumph of agricultural industry.17Tennessee was one of three southern states that abolished slavery prior to the end of the Civil War. A constitutional convention in Tennessee passed an emancipation amendment on 10 January 1865. Pro-Union voters in Tennessee ratified this amendment on 22 February 1865. McKitrick, Andrew Johnson, 127. It was not merely a blessing
to the slave, but a blessing to the master. I put it to the common sense of
all who hear me: what possible motive had the slave for a careful, suc-
cessful cultivation of the soil? What concern could he have for increasing
the wealth of the master, or for improving and beautifying the land? The
wealth of the master did not attach to the slave, but the reverse. The natural
tendency of wealth was to deepen the chasm between the master and the
slave, and to break up all sympathy between them. The small slave owners
went to the field with their few bondmen and worked side by side with
them. Humane and kindly relations sprang up between them; common toils
and common privations made them, in some sense, friends. But the reverse
was the case with the rich and great masters. Their hands were unused to
toil. They could afford to leave their slaves in the hands of soulless over-
seers and drivers who had no motives of kindness and good will. Thus it
was for the interest of the slave to make the rich man poor and the poor man
poorer. To reduce as far as possible the difference between themselves and
others, and since they themselves could not be masters, they had a direct
and powerful motive for reducing their masters to the poverty of slaves.
This, however, was not the worst element of the situation. The very
soil of your State was cursed with a burning sense of injustice. Slavery was
the parent of anger and hate. Your fields could not be lovingly planted nor
faithfully cultivated in its presence. The eye of the overseer could not be
everywhere, and cornhills could be covered with clods in preference to soft
and pulverized soil in their absence, for the hand that planted cared nothing
for the harvest. Thus you will see that emancipation has liberated the land
as well as the people.
In contemplating the successful husbandry of the British Islands,
abounding, as they do, with fertile fields and the most perfectly formed and
best developed cattle, a distinguished Frenchman was led to exclaim: “It is
not fertility but liberty that cultivates a country.” The State of Tennessee is
now to be cultivated by liberty; by knowledge which comes of liberty; by
the respectability of labor; by the motive of general welfare, and by the
sense of patriotism confined to no particular class, and I predict for her a
vast and general increase of happiness and prosperity in the new era which
has dawned upon her.
Gentlemen, if this prophecy of prosperity to your State shall prove
slow of fulfillment, or be defeated, the fault will not be one to the new order
of liberty, but to the old order of slavery. It will not be in the emancipated
slave, but in the discontented master. It will not be due to any inherent
defect of the principle of liberty, but to the inherent disposition of despotic
power, to supplant freedom. A dog will scratch his neck long after his
collar is removed. The illusion is kept up when its cause has departed.
Neither the slave nor his master can abandon all at once the deeply in-
trenched errors and habits of centuries.
I take it that one part of the mission of this State Agricultural Associa-
tion is the speedy and radical extinction of the evils inherited by the
emancipated class from their former condition, and that, therefore, it is
appropriate, on this occasion, to point out some of the more palpable of
those errors for condemnation and banishment; and inculcate in their stead
the wiser and better ideas, suggested by the condition upon which we have
entered.
TREATMENT OF ANIMALS.
There is no denying that slavery had a direct and positive tendency to
produce coarseness and brutality in the treatment and management of
domestic animals, especially those most useful to agricultural industry. Not
only the slave, but the horse, the ox, and the mule shared the general
feeling of indifference to rights naturally engendered by a state of slavery.
The master blamed the overseer; the overseer the slave, and the slave the
horses, oxen, and mules; and violence and brutality fell upon the animals
as a consequence. Now, there is no successful farming without well-trained
and well-treated horses and oxen, and one of the greatest pleasures con-
nected with agricultural life may be found in the pleasant relations capable
of subsisting between the farmer and his four-legged companions; for they
are company as well as helpers in his toil. l have seen men spend valuable
hours of the best of the day, chasing the horse and the mule in the open
field, which but for the abuses heaped upon them when in harness, would
have come instantly upon the call of their master. The loss arising from this
source is two-fold. Both man and beast have been wearied by the chase,
and the temper of both has been rendered unfavorable to calm and steady
exertion. It should be the study of every farmer to make his horse his
companion and friend, and to do this, there is but one rule, and that is,
uniform sympathy and kindness. All loud and boisterous commands, all
brutal flogging, should be banished from the field, and only words of cheer
and encouragement should be tolerated. A horse is in many respects like a
man. He has the five senses, and has memory, affection and reason to a
limited degree. When young, untrained, and untamed, he has unbounded
faith in his strength, and fleetness. He runs, jumps, and plays in the pride of
his perfections. But convince him that he is a creature of law as well as of
freedom by a judicious and kindly application of your superior power, and
he will conform his conduct to that law, far better than your most law-
abiding citizen.
CARE OF AGRICULTURAL IMPLEMENTS.
Gentlemen, in farming, as everywhere else, time is money;18This proverb first appears in Benjamin Franklin's essay “Advice to a Young Tradesman, Written by an Old One." Leonard W. Labaree, ed., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (New Haven, 1959-), 3: 306. and one-
tenth of all the time of some farmers is lost to useful labor in searching for
and mending tools carelessly flung down anywhere and everywhere and
left forgotten to rust, decay, and ruin. I have seen in some of our Western
States, amid the snows and rains of winter, costly plows, harrows, and
mowing machines exposed to all the destructive forces of the elements. Of
course, men who farm thus bring no honor to agriculture, but are a disgrace
to that vocation. The loss of time, labor, and money, as in the other cases,
are not the only evils of this style of practical farming. The loss of temper,
the mental confusion to which this one evil gives rise, will rack a man’s
constitution more than the heaviest, steadiest strokes of well-directed
exertion.
THE WELL AND THE WOODPILE.
Life is said to be made up of little things, and small annoyances are
often more distressing to the temper than large ones. There can be no happy
and successful farming when there is no peace at home. When the wife
smiles and the children are happy and gleeful, the toil and burdens of the
husbandman are light and easily borne. Everything, therefore, which tends
to make home happy is in the line of a wise economy, both of time and
labor. Where a woman must go half a mile in the woods to tote brush or
rotten bark to make a fire, or a quarter of a mile to the spring to fetch water,
it is impossible that household affairs can go on either regularly or pleasant-
ly. Such economy is unworthy of the sense of a Hottentot or a Bushman.19Douglass refers to the San and the Khoikhoi peoples of southern Africa.
If you come up tired and hungry from the field; if your house is not neat,
sweet, and in order; if the eyes of your wife and daughter are red with
smoke and tears; if your children are fretting and crying, and you yourself
suffer from loss of temper, you have in fact only yourself to blame. You
have neglected to supply your woodshed with an ample quantity of sound
and well-seasoned wood, and to put down a well of pure water at your door,
and have thus omitted the primary conditions of peace, purity, and order in
your household. By all means, be sure of your water and wood!
MANURES.
Successful farming does not entirely depend upon good plowing, har-
rowing, and hoeing, nor prompt attention to seedtime and harvest. Every
crop gathered from the field takes something valuable from the soil upon
which it is grown, and the richest land in the world can be made poor if we
take everything from it and give it nothing in return. While providing for
ourselves, our next best thought should be given to the question as to how
we shall provide for the wants of the soil out of which comes our own
living. All flesh is grass,201 Pet. 1 : 24. and the amount of vegetable matter we obtain
from the earth will be the measure of the life and happiness of the men and
animals who subsist upon it. Now, there need be no such thing in the world
as wornout land. The same soil has been cultivated in China during the
space of two thousand years, and the land is as rich to-day as when the plow
and the spade first turned it to the light and heat of the sun. The explanation
of this prolonged fertility is manure. The Chinaman knows its value and
puts his knowledge in practice. He knows how to make, save, and apply it.
My advice to you is to go and do likewise. Your first maxim should be: let
nothing be wasted! Nothing that will rot in the ground is useless, and
nothing should be allowed to decay unused. The very water and soap
employed in washing your hands and clothes should find their way to your
trimly-arranged bed of compost. The bones from your table should be made
also to do double duty. The soil of England is richer and yields better crops
to-day than two hundred years ago, and the reason is the same there as in
China. They attend to the wants of the soil as well as to their own.21After an eighteenth-century increase in agricultural output of about 43 percent, British agricultural practices underwent a dramatic transformation. Many observers advocated “high farming," by which was meant high productivity. There was substantial interest in the use of crop rotation, soilcakes, powdered bones, guano, and superphosphates and in innovations in machinery and transportation to determine management policy. J. D. Chambers and G. E. Mingay, The Agricultural Revolution, 1750-1880 (New York, 1966), 170-98; Christabel S. Orwin and Edith H. Whetham, History of British Agriculture, 1846-1914 (London, 1964), 3-7, 28-34; Phyllis Deane and W. A. Cole, British Economic Growth, 1688-1959: Trends and Structure (Cambridge, 1967), 62-82; F. M. L. Thompson, “The Second Agricultural Revolution, 1815-1880," Economic History Review, 21: 62-77 (April 1968). Feed
the land and it will feed you! Starve the land and it will starve you!
AGRICULTURAL BOOKS AND PAPERS.
Knowledge is power. There is no work that men are required to do,
which they cannot better and more economically do with education than
without it. The trouble with us as a people has been to work without a
knowledge of the theory of work. We could build ships if some one would
draft them. We could build a house if some one would draw the plan. All
that we have done has been done by rote. We have farmed without the
knowledge of the philosophy of farming. We have used our muscles, but
not our minds. Under the old regime we were not expected to think, but
only to do as we were told. We were not allowed to profit even by our own
experience, and to do things in the easiest and best way which our practical
knowledge might suggest. The master and the overseer directed every
stroke, and we were but living machines. All is changed now. The machine
must begin to think, and in this the reading of agricultural books and papers
will materially assist. It used to be said, if you want to keep a secret from a
negro, put it in a book or newspaper. Thus must be so no longer. Every
colored farmer and mechanic should take and read one or more of the many
excellent mechanic and agricultural journals.22Farm journals flourished in the nineteenth century, some four hundred having appeared by the Civil War, when they had a growing readership of about 350,000. These mostly northern and shortlived publications provided practical advice and information on such topics as farm management, tillage practices, and soil conservation, often introducing their subscribers to new and controversial techniques. Southern journals were fewer and less concerned with yeoman husbandry than large-scale planting; consequently, they had fewer resources and less popular support than their northern counterparts. Gates, Farmer’s Age, 338-58; Danhof, Change in Agriculture, 55-59; Gilbert M. Tucker, American Agricultural Periodicals: An Historical Sketch (Albany, N.Y., 1909). If you cannot read yourself,
let your son or daughter read to you. Depend upon it, an hour spent in this
way will do more for you than the labor of any other hour in the day. Muscle
is mighty, but mind is mightier, and there is no better field for the exercise
of mind than is found in the cultivation of the soil.
THE FARMER’S NATURAL ENEMIES.
I shall attempt no solution of the origin of evil in the world. Whether it
came by the fall of Adam or the fall of anybody else, I neither know nor
care, for it does not matter. It is enough to know that we have it and it is in
abundance, and that the best use we can make of it is to resist and destroy it
as far as we can. All nature teems with it, and the life of a farmer is a
constant battle. He not only has to contend with the elements, but with all
manner of destructive insects. Flies, bugs, worms, caterpillars, grasshop-
pers, and locusts spring out of the ground like armed warriors and endeavor
to flank and defeat him. He must fight or die. His foes will neither treat nor
compromise. It is “kill or be killed.” Not an hour is to be lost. Time gives
strength to the enemy and weakness to the farmer. This insect host must be
met and stamped out without delay. The advantage of a single hour will
sometimes enable the caterpillar to ruin your fruit crop. Prevention is better
than cure, and it is better to destroy those enemies in their eggs than to wait
until they are full of life and activity. The warrior uses the telescope to
discover his enemy. The farmer should use the microscope. With a little
experience in its use, he can anticipate his foe. Indeed, you should go a step
further than this. You should not only make war upon the enemy, but upon
the conditions of his existence. Like most of the enemies of human life and
welfare, they originate in darkness and in all manner of unclean and un-
sightly places. Break up the nest of weed, brier, and thorns in your fence
comers. Take away your old, rotten and worm-eaten ground rail. Put a
sound one in its place. Let in the bright sunlight and the pure air. Summon
fire and water, if it need be, to clean out these breeders of vermin to prey
upon your crops. For when you have done all in your power, you will still
see more to do, but you will at least be rewarded by abundant returns for
your wisdom, courage, vigilance and industry.
UNION AND IMPROVEMENT.
Gentlemen, I approach this subject with less confidence of meeting
your approval than at other points. As a race, we have suffered from two
very opposite causes. Disparagement on the one hand, and undue praise on
the other. I propose to err on neither side. This question of improvement or
non-improvement involves the whole subject of our destiny as a part of the
American people. In other words, it is the question whether we shall
advance or recede, rise or fall, survive or perish; for one or the other of
these things must necessarily happen to us. To stand still is utterly impossi-
ble. If we even could hold our own, and stand where we now are, the effect
of improvement in all around us would make our standing still positive
retrogression. Of course, gentlemen, we stand to-day in point of civiliza-
tion far in the rear of our white fellow-citizens. We are, in fact, wearing the
old clothes left by a by-gone generation. The books we read, the sermons
we hear, the prayers we repeat, are all obtained from the white race. We
have neither made books, sermons, prayers, nor hymns. We have no sci-
ence nor philosophy of our own. We have neither history nor poetry. As
Andrew Johnson used to say of Congress: “We are hanging on the verge”
of the white man’s civilization. It is painful to make such an admission as
this; but nothing is gained by concealing the truth either from ourselves or
from others.
The question, which the future has to answer, is: Whether the negro is
what he is to-day because of his mental and moral constitution, or because
he has been enslaved and degraded for centuries. If it shall be found, after
the lapse of twenty-five years of freedom, that the colored people of this
country have made no improvement in their social condition, it will con-
firm the opinion that the negro is, by his very nature, limited to a servile
condition. But if, on the other hand, we supply the world with the proof of
our advancement to a plane, even a little above that on which slavery left
us, we shall prove that, like all other men, we are capable of civilization,
where its conditions are accessible to us. Still further, to simplify the
question, which the present is pressing upon us. It is: Whether the black
man will prove a better master to himself than his white master was to him.
This, then, is the work to which we have to address ourselves as a race.
We are to prove that we can better our own condition, and that by the
development of our own self-contained qualities. I need not stop here to
point out the particular modes of action by which this can be accomplished.
I will only indicate one.
ACCUMULATE PROPERTY.
Yes, accumulate property. This may sound to you like a new gospel.
You have been accustomed to hear that money is the root of all evil;231 Tim. 6: 10. that it
is hard for the rich to enter the kingdom of Heaven;24Luke 28: 24-25 and Mark 10: 23. that this world is of no
account; that we should take no thought for to-morrow, and much more of
the same sort. In answer to all which I say: that no people can ever make
any social or mental improvement whose exertions are thus limited. Pover-
ty is our greatest calamity. It draws down upon us the very condition which
makes us a helpless, hopeless, dependent, and dispirited people, the target
for the contempt and scorn of all around us. On the other hand, property,
money, if you please, will purchase for us the only condition upon which
any people can rise to the dignity of genuine manhood; for, without proper-
ty, there can be no leisure. Without leisure, there can be no thought.
Without thought, there can be no invention. Without invention, there can
be no progress.
But how shall we get money? Work for it and save it when you get it. I
have spoken of slavery as our enemy. I have nothing to take back at that
point. It has robbed us of education. It has robbed us of the care due us from
our mothers. It has written its ugliness in our countenance, deformed our
feet, and twisted our limbs out of shape; and yet this same slavery has been,
in some sense, our best friend. It has trained us to regular industry, and
hardened our muscles to toil, and thus has left in our hands the staff of all
accomplishments. We can work, and the grateful earth yields as readily and
as bountifully to the touch of black industry as of white. We can work, and
by this means we can retrieve all our losses. Knowledge, wisdom, culture,
refinement, manners are all founded on work, and the wealth which work
brings.
As I already have said: we must save as well as work. This cannot be
done by traveling from place to place in search of new homes. Rolling
stones gather no moss.25Publilius Syrus, Maxim 524. Emerson says that the men who made Rome
worth going to see staid there.26Douglass possibly refers to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Boston,” in which he writes that “there is great testimony of discriminating persons to the effect that Rome is endowed with the enchanting property of inspiring a longing in men there to live and there to die.” Emerson, Complete Works of Emerson, 12: 184-85. In nine cases out of ten a man’s condition
is worse by changing his location. You had far better endeavor to remove
the evil from your door than to remove and leave it there. “It is better to
endure the ills you have than to fly to others you know not of." If you have
got a few acres, stick by them. The sweat and toil you put into them will add
to their value and enable you to buy more. Every new beginning you make
will have its peculiar troubles. Infancy is the time of special dangers to
measures as well to men. Every baby must have the whooping cough and
measles. Life is too short, time is too valuable, to be wasted in the experi-
ment of seeking new homes. People are about as good in your neigh-
borhood as anywhere else in the world, and may need you to make them
better.
But gentlemen, I have detained you too long already. Our destiny is in
our own hands. We are no longer slaves, but free men. We are no longer
property, but persons. We are not aliens, but citizens. We are not only men,
but men among men. If any people may have a future, a prosperous and
happy future, such a future is possible to us, and I hope it will be the
business of every man who hears my voice to-day, to contribute his full
share to the sum of the common welfare of our race.