Good Men Are God in the Flesh: An Address Delivered in Boston, Massachusetts, on September 22, 1890
GOOD MEN ARE GOD IN THE FLESH: AN ADDRESS
DELIVERED IN BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS,
ON 22 SEPTEMBER 1890
Boston , 23 September 1890. Other texts in Boston , 23 September 1890;
Boston , 23 September 1890; Detroit , 3 October 1890.
Douglass resided in Port-au-Prince as minister resident and consul general
from October 1889 to the following July when he returned to the United States
on a leave of absence from his diplomatic post. Douglass used the opportunity
to attend a number of public meetings including a reunion of aged abolitionist
leaders held in three sessions at Meionaon Hall and Tremont Temple in Boston
on 22 September 1890. Pictures of William Lloyd Garrison, John Brown,
Theodore Parker, George Thompson, and Lewis Hayden hung around the
lecture halls. The meeting, the Boston Herald declared, “was characterized
throughout by the greatest enthusiasm, both on the part of the participants and
by those who crowded the seats of the auditorium. . . . In the flesh were
visible many veterans who had come up from those times of struggle and
peril, when the great battle between freedom and slavery was raging in the
land." During the morning session at Meionaon Hall, William H. Dupree,
Archibald H. Grimké, the Reverend A. P. Putnam, and Franklin B. Sanborn
delivered major addresses while Douglass spoke briefly. The Reverend Mark
Trafton, George W. Putnam, Nathan Appleton, Hamilton Wilcox, Charles
Stearns, and George T. Downing spoke during the afternoon session. Doug-
lass was the major speaker at the evening session held at Tremont Temple. The
Boston Globe asserted: “The hall was crowded and the session was the most
enthusiastic of the series.” Dupree presided and began the meeting by ap-
pointing a committee to arrange another reunion in 1891. The Reverend
Alonzo A. Miner delivered the first speech and Charles L. Woodworth dis-
cussed the role of the New England clergy and the Kansas-Nebraska Act in
eliminating slavery. Douglass spoke next and the meeting closed by the au-
dience singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Boston , 21
September 1890; Boston , 23 September 1890.
No one man can tell the truth. Not even two men of the same complexion,
sometimes, can tell it. It requires a white man and a black man—as black
as he can be—to “tole” the whole truth to you.
I tried this morning to show you how the people are being humbugged.
How the South has tried to create the impression that some profound
problem is to be solved in connection with the colored race, that something
in their color, their character, makes it extremely difficult to reconcile the
difference between the two races.
I, on the other hand, utterly deny that there is any problem before the
American people. The only question of moment which ought now to
engage their attention is whether this nation will keep its pledge, will carry
out its principles fought for in the late war, and execute the constitution it
has sworn to support. There is no negro problem, no Catholic, no Pres-
byterian, no Methodist problem to be solved by the government of the
United States. Its business is to treat everybody with even and exact justice.
Let me tell you a secret. You would never have heard a word about this
“problem” if only the negroes of the South had voted the Democratic
ticket. It isn’t a race problem. It is a problem between the Republican and
the Democratic parties. It comes from the denial of the southern white that
a negro may be a Republican, or that a Republican may exist south of
Mason and Dixon’s line. The race question was hitched on to inflame your
prejudices.
But don’t let me disturb the sweet harmony of this meeting. We are told
we should forget the past. Our friends think it is wrong to stir up the
memories consequent upon the great agitation we are here to commemo-
rate. But I don’t feel that way.
There are certain differences which must be settled according to the
principles of right, and these we may discuss with calmness in Boston and
come to a correct conclusion in regard to them.
I have discovered how prejudice against the negro may be removed
very easily. It is only necessary for you and me to do something to improve
the morals, the character, the education of our people in order to do away
with these prejudices. Once I went to Pittsfield, N.H., to speak against
slavery.1Douglass recalled this visit to Pittsfield, New Hampshire, in numerous speeches and described it in great detail in . The exact date of the visit has not been confirmed but Douglass sometimes places it in 1842. Douglass, , 501-05. I applied for lodging at the house of a man who took the Liberator.
He, I thought, would welcome me; but, instead, he turned away from me.
He was willing that the slave should be liberated, if only he would stay
where he belonged. His wife, however, admitted me. At supper the good
man was absent. He had lost his appetite. I felt pretty badly myself.
Afterwards, at the town hall, I spoke to 15 persons, but nobody invited me
home to dinner with him. At the hotel they said: “We don’t allow niggers in
here.”
In the afternoon and evening I delivered two more speeches. Being
tired and hungry, I felt lonely, and was attracted to a graveyard near by.
While contemplating the vanity of human pride and ambition, I met a
gentleman, who said to me: “Mr. Douglass, I’m not an abolitionist. I’m a
Democrat, but I’m a man, and if you’ll come to my house, you shall be
made at home while you stay in this town.” I followed him to his door,
filled with gratitude and emotion, and just as I got inside, a little girl ran to
her mother, crying: “Mamma, mamma, there’s a nigger in the house!” The
good man smoothed over this awkward incident as well as possible, and in
a few moments the good wife, having given me food and drink, had parted
with her prejudices. This was Mrs. Moses Norris, wife of the then senator
from New Hampshire. There was a revolution in that man and woman
when they began to do something for me.
And so with you, my friends.
I am going to pitch into Dr. Woodworth. He said the Republican party,
the abolitionists, Mr. Lincoln, didn’t abolish slavery, but the good Lord did
it.2Douglass alludes to the preceding speaker, Charles Louis Woodworth (1820-98). In his address, “New England Clergy and Their Relation to the Kansas-Nebraska Bill and the Abolition of Slavery," Woodworth argued that neither the abolitionists, the Free Soilers, nor the Republicans deserved credit for ending slavery because their programs had conceded that a federal emancipation program was unconstitutional. He instead claimed that “men were the instruments in God's hands for the overthrow of slavery. . . ." Born in Somers, Connecticut, Woodworth graduated from Amherst College in 1845 and the Hartford Theological Seminary in 1848. He occupied the pulpit of the Congregational church in Amherst, Massachusetts, from 1849 until he joined the Union army as a chaplain in 1863. After the Civil War, he served the American Missionary Association as district secretary for New England for over two decades (1866-88). From 1893 until his death, Woodworth resumed his original ministerial post in Amherst. Boston , 22 September 1890; Boston , 23 September 1890; (Boston, 1899), 36. Now, the good Lord had a chance to abolish slavery a long time ago.
While I believe there are eternal forces ever in motion, carrying on the
course of truth and justice in this world, still, when I am looking around to
give thanks, I recognize a two-fold duty, to express gratitude to God and to
good men—who are God in the flesh. Of those good men, pre-eminent in
connection with this cause, was William Lloyd Garrison, and, scarcely less
eminent than he, was Wendell Phillips.
How well I knew Mr. Garrison! How much I loved him! It was a great
revelation to me to meet the abolitionists of the Garrisonian school. I came
here 52 years ago, a young man in search of freedom, thinking that the
white people were banded together, by virtue of their white skins, to
destroy my race. But, when I heard Mr. Garrison for the first time uttering
the thoughts which had struggled to find expression from my own heart, I
saw the deadened hopes of my race resurrected and ascended. And I was
right.3Douglass apparently alludes to the date of his escape from slavery and settlement in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in fall 1838. There is no record of his hearing William Lloyd Garrison speak until 1839 or of his visiting Boston until 1841. Douglass, , 236-37; Quarles, , 1112.
But I hadn’t heard of those 3000 New England ministers.4An allusion to the petition signed by 3,050 northern clergymen protesting against the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854.
I expect to live long enough to hear of speeches being delivered all over
this northern country, declaring that slavery was abolished by the church of
God.
Two hundred years ago the problem was: Is it right to baptize the
negro? It was a difficult question. It was said that the subject of baptism
should be a free moral agent, and the negro wasn’t a free moral agent.
About the only thing he could ask for was the baptism of his master. That
should be enough for him. It was urged that, while the master had a right to
the negro’s body, the Lord had a right to his soul.
This left the black man pretty destitute. When he looked for his body,
his master had it; when he looked for his soul, the Lord had it. And there he
was.
Thus this movement had a religious beginning. I don’t think, however,
that the ministers had a great deal to do with the abolition of slavery.
A long time ago I said some terrible things against the Union, but, like
my ministerial brethren, I got light as I went along. I learned that the negro
race, bleeding as it was, was safer in the Union than out of it. At length I
stood with William Lloyd Garrison, rejoicing in the salvation of the Union
and the abolition of slavery.
The freedom of the negro was brought about by means. We would
never have heard of Abraham Lincoln but for the men whom I have men-
tioned and others like them. It was they who made Abraham Lincoln,
Charles Sumner, William H. Seward, possible—who made the Re-
publican party possible. All honor to these men, fired, not by the pulpit but
by the Garrisonian platform.
I have no doubt Abraham Lincoln abhorred slavery, but he was fettered
by interpretations of the constitution, and was always aching to get hold of
the monster and strangle it. As fast as Garrison and Phillips and orators like
them created a moral sentiment for Mr. Lincoln, just so fast he went.
At the South just now they are afraid, they say, of black supremacy.
Isn’t that absurd! They are throwing a red herring at you, giving you a false
alarm. Who’s afraid? I’m not, and I’m as white as I am black. I’m not
afraid of the negro ever getting the upper hand in me.
But they talk of the ignorance of the negro. Did you ever hear the
Democratic party complain of the ignorance of the Irish vote? Not from the
ignorance of the negro, but from his intelligence, is there danger. He
knows your Mr. Hoar from your Mr. Butler.5Douglass probably refers to two U.S. senators: George F. Hoar of Massachusetts and Matthew C. Butler of South Carolina.
For whom are protection at the ballot box and equal education asked?
For those, I tell you, who protected the women and children of the South
during the war, for those who tilled your soil with their horny hands, for
those who watered the land with their tears, who shed their blood for you.
All we ask, all we beg, is to be protected as well as are those who fought,
not with you, but against you.