Normal to Frederick Douglass, December 25, 1857
NORMAL1The identity of Douglass’s Philadelphia correspondent who wrote under the name “Normal” has not been determined, although he contributed numerous letters to Douglass’s newspaper in 1857 and 1858. FDP, 10 April, 8 May, 5 June 1857, 22 January, 23 April, 15 October 1858. TO FREDERICK DOUGLASS
Philadelphia, Penn. 25 Dec[ember] 1857.
Another Fugitive slave case2“Normal” here refers to the case of Jacob Dupen (c. 1832–?), a slave who had escaped from his owner, William M. Edelin, in Baltimore. Dupen was living as a farmer near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, at the time of his arrest by U.S. marshals. He made no attempt to avoid capture and appeared confused when brought before Judge John K. Kane for a hearing on 18 December 1857. Dupen readily answered that Edelin was his master and that he had originally lived in Calvert County, Maryland, even after Kane advised him that he could refuse to answer. Dupen, who was not represented by legal counsel, was returned to slavery after the hearing. William M. Bull, a lawyer hired by Dupen’s friends, attempted to intercede on the slave’s behalf, but did not arrive until after the hearing was over. Philadelphia Bulletin, 18 December 1857; Campbell, Slave Catchers, 133, 204. has been called up and carried through our beautiful courts. The Fugitive whom the reports make to appear as deficient of brains as one could well be and yet lay claim to kinship with the genus homo, was condemned on his own testimony, remanded to his claimant,—without having been permitted the benefit of counsel, taken in broad day-light over the sin-cursed streets of our boasted city of Brotherly Love,3According to tradition, William Penn named the capital city of his colony Philadelphia, Greek for “brotherly love,” in order to reflect his ideal for the settlement. The book of Revelation mentions the name, associated with an ancient city in Asia Minor, as the location of one of the seven churches housing angels of the apocalypse. Rev. 1:11, 3:7; George R. Stewart, American PlaceNames: A Concise and Selective Dictionary for the Continental United States of America (New York, 1970), 370; Kelsie B. Harder, ed., Illustrated Dictionary of Place Names: United States and
Canada (New York, 1976), 423. and without a pitying voice or helping hand, thrust back into the lash-resounding knell of American slavery. Such damnable outrages almost sufficient to drive one to atheism. How can an omnipotent Jehovah permit man whom He created “little lower than the angels”4Ps. 8:5; Heb. 2:7, 2:9. to ravish his fellow-men in so blackened and disgraceful a manner?
One beautiful and significant feature of this whole affair is that it all took place under the very eaves of our annual Garrisonian Fair.5From 1836 to the Civil War, the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Fair was held annually in Philadelphia under the auspices of the American Anti-Slavery Society. If possible, the fair convened in the city’s Assembly Building in conjunction with other abolitionist conventions. Many local abolitionist societies donated crafts for sale in order to raise money to support the printing of antislavery newspapers and tracts, and to provide funds for slaves fleeing north. In addition to crafts produced by local women’s abolition societies, the fair often imported crafts from British abolitionist societies. The fair, held in December, was often called the “Winter Fair.” The Pennsylvania fair was one of the longest and most successful of the many antislavery fairs in the 1850s. Prominent abolitionist speakers frequently addressed attendees and solicited donations from them. Lib., 28 January 1853; Report of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society Committee of the Fourteenth Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Fair, 9 January 1850 (Philadelphia, 1850); Julie Roy Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Anti-Slavery Movement (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998), 193.—Of course we do not mean to say ought against the happy ones at the Fair. Far be it from us to do so. But we must state the facts.
APROPOS OF THE FAIR AND ITS ETECRAS.
The Fair, that was all well enough, that is to say, it netted over a thousand dollars (so a member told us); but the convention which ran through three days we hardly know what to make of. We’ll give you the FACTS, and let you think of them at your leisure. The time, as was justly remarked by one of our city press, was taken up for the most part with an unprofitable discussion of points, which finally sunk down to personal abuse; and the convention barely escaped being broken up in a row. The low blackguardism of a well known loud mouthed semi-saxon individual6Probably Robert Purvis (1810–98), a prominent leader of antebellum Philadelphia’s black community and one of the most influential African Americans in the Garrisonian wing of the abolitionist movement. He was the son of Harriet Juda, a free black woman, and William Purvis, a white cotton broker of Charleston, South Carolina. In 1819, Robert moved north with his family to be educated. Upon his father’s death in the mid-1820s, Purvis inherited a substantial fortune, which he used to support a wide array of benevolent causes, including temperance, women’s rights, penal reform, and integrated education. He helped launch the Liberator in 1831, became a charter member of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833, and served as both president and vice president of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society. From the 1830s onward, he actively assisted fugitives trying to escape slavery. Following Douglass’s split with Garrison, Purvis frequently attacked Douglass in speeches. Purvis pointed some of his canards at Douglass’s relationship with Julia Griffiths. Douglass responded to many of these attacks in speeches against Garrison and Purvis and in editorials in his newspaper. Margaret Hope Bacon, But One Race: The Life of Robert Purvis (New York, 2007), 7–9, 126, 173; Still, Underground Railroad, 711; Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 24–25, 55–56; Joseph A. Borome, “Robert Purvis and his Early Challenge to American Racism,” NHB, 30:8–10 (May 1967); Pauline C. Johnson, “Robert Purvis,” ibid., 5:65–66 (December 1941); NCAB, 1:413. who monopolized the biggest part of time, was really disgraceful to the society,—We must certainly advise the society to pandor a little less to the inordinate
vanity and sickening self-conceit of this bombastic fulminate, and get at least some sane and sensible men to occupy their platform on Public occasions. His course bar-room attack on Frederick Douglass was as disgusting as it was cowardly. This is the second time since Mr. Douglass’ visit here, that this man has attempted to villify him before respectable audiences. Why don’t he come out when Mr. Douglass is here to answer for himself? Why does he so sedulously keep out of the way until Mr. D. is hundreds of miles off and then stab him in the dark? Why? But his attack recoiled upon him right on the spot, as the sequel will show.
A hard looking customer named De Wolf7Possibly Calvin De Wolf (1815–99), an abolitionist and lawyer from Chicago. Born in Pennsylvania, De Wolfe received an education at the Grand River Institute, an Ohio manual labor school. He relocated to Illinois, where he studied law after teaching briefly. Outraged at the murder of Elijah Lovejoy, De Wolf helped found the Anti-Slavery Society of Chicago and became its secretary. He later assisted in the creation of the Western Citizen, an abolitionist newspaper. In 1858, De Wolf was part of a group indicted for assisting a runaway slave to escape, but the case was dropped under the Lincoln administration. As a Republican, he served two terms on the Chicago board of aldermen. Milwaukee Sentinel, 29 November 1899; Bessie Louise Pierce, A History of Chicago: The Beginning of a City, vol. 1: 1673–1848 (Chicago, 1937), 243–45; Howard Louis Conard, “Calvin De Wolf,” Magazine of Western History, 13:221–25 (December 1890). now came forward, and commenced by declaring himself an ultra abolitionist and a non-resistant.8A nonresistant was a believer in a principled form of nonviolence or pacifism. Many abolitionist followers of William Lloyd Garrison had adopted principles of nonresistance in whole or in part by the late 1830s; they abstained from participation in the political process, viewing government as inherently coercive. Perry, Radical Abolitionism, 45–46, 76–80. He took especial pains to have people understand this last. We regret very much that he did not keep his non-resistant ideas to himself; if he had done so, he most likely would not have been called a liar and an unprincipled man, as he subsequently was.—He said he did not question the sincerity of the Garrisonians, but he was emphatically opposed to their wholesale systematic denunciations of every body and everything that does not see exactly as they do. “Honest, well-meaning men, as strong abolitionists as you are, said he, men who can go with you nine steps in ten, are driven away from you with kicks and stripes, because they cannot take the tenth.” Among other instances, he mentioned that of Frederick Douglass. “When this man was with you, he was the noblest Roman of you all,9Julius Caesar, act 5, sc. 5, line 68. and you adored him almost as a son; but the instant that he changed his opinions on the constitution, you denounced him as an ingrate, the vilest of men, not because he was less an abolitionist than you, but because he differed with you on a single point.” He called such a course unwise and unjust. He then went on to say that Slaveholders should not be denounced, but reasoned with and treated like men. To those remarks Remond10Charles Lenox Remond. replied in his usual declamatory style, very spiritedly and with no resort to personality. The Rev. Jabes B. Campbell11Jabez Pitt Campbell (1815–91) was born in Slaughter Neck, Delaware, to free black parents, Anthony and Catherine Campbell. When Jabez Campbell was a youth, his father used him as a security for a debt. When Anthony could not repay the debt, Campbell was forced into slavery. After four and a half years, he was able to pay off the debt and, at age eighteen, regain his freedom. Settling in Philadelphia, Campbell became a member of the Bethel A.M.E. Church and entered the ministry in 1839. From 1856 to 1858 he served as the editor of the Christian Recorder and in 1864 was elected bishop of the A.M.E. Church. Never prominent in black antislavery activities, Campbell was a member of the American Colonization Society and became its vice president in 1876. Throughout his lifetime, he and his wife, Mary Ann, contributed money to many philanthropic institutions, including Wilberforce College in Ohio and Jabez Pitt Campbell College (later Jackson State University) in Mississippi. African Repository and Colonial Journal, 53:48 (Washington D.C., 1877); Benjamin T. Tanner, An Apology for African Methodism (Baltimore, 1867), 158–71; Jessie Carney Smith, ed., Notable Black American Women: Book II (Detroit, 1996), 80–81; Simmons, Men of Mark, 1031–33. now came forward and took issue with the Garrisonians in their abuse of honest colored men and colored churches, that were fighting with all their might against oppression and wrong. He said he has had charge of colored pulpits for 20 years, and they were always open to an appeal for the slave; but he wanted his audience to understand that he was not a non-resistant, and he should never allow Chas. Lennox Remond and Robert Purvis to come into his own pulpit to denounce him and wish him and his church in perdition. Other men were as honest as they, other papers as effective as theirs. Where is a truer abolitionist than Gerrit Smith. Fred. Douglas, and Wm. Goodell, to which school he
(Campbell) was proud to belong? Where will you find a truer advocate of
the cause than “The True Wesleyan,[”]12Based in New York City, the True Wesleyan was the official organ of the small abolitionist ‘“comeouter” sect of the Wesleyan Methodist Connection, which was launched in 1843. McKivigan, War against Proslavery Religion, 85, 86, 131; Sernet, North Star Country, 83. The N. Y. Independent13The Independent (1848–1928) was a weekly newspaper published in New York. Originally a religious newspaper, the was dedicated to the survival of the Congregationalist Church after several Presbyterian and Congregationalist leaders adopted a “Plan of Union” for missionary labors in the western territories. In 1854 the Independent’s format was changed in an attempt to broaden the newspaper’s appeal to non-Congregationalist readers. Theodore Tilton, who joined the newspaper in 1854, placed a stronger emphasis on antislavery, temperance, and woman suffrage. The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, an early contributor, served as editor from 1861 until 1863, when Tilton became editor in chief. In 1867, Tilton changed the Independent’s format to a weekly political magazine, and the religious emphasis was slowly abandoned. Tilton recruited Douglass to write the article “The Work Before Us” for the Independent in 1868. The magazine absorbed a rival, Harper’s Weekly, in 1916. In 1921 the Independent merged with the Weekly Review and later with the Outlook, forming the Outlook and Independent in 1928. That final incarnation folded in 1932. Lib., 8 December 1848; New York Independent, 27 August 1868; New York Times, 23 April 1916, 21 September 1921, 29 June 1932; Louis Filler, “Liberalism, Anti-Slavery, and the Founders of the Independent,” NEQ, 27:291–306 (September 1954).
or Fred. Douglass’ Paper? (applause) The aforesaid R. Purvis could endure this heresy no longer. He raved and tore and broke things generally, and particularly did he break vocem suam14Latin for “his voice.” into sundry yells and very high notes. It was not enough for him to abuse generally everybody who sympathized with Gerrit Smith’s views, but as is his wont he had to come down to low epithets and personalties, “He said Frederick Douglass had been born a miserable suppliant slave, and he had not yet out-grown all the essential of the crawling servile, it was embedded in his bones. We did not cast him off because he changed his views, but because WE believed him to be an unprincipled man. It is a libel on us; if uttered as it must have been, with a knowledge of the fact, it was a bare lie! [A]nd there was but one word which befitted its utterer, and that is, he is a liar! A black man standing for the Constitution, indeed! It was dishonesty on its very face. We have labored to very little purpose, if there were still left black men who are so detestably mean as to claim the Constitution for Freedom?” (that is to say it is a mean, cowardly piece of business for any body to differ with us, but for black men to do so, that I shan’t allow.)—Here Robert stopped for breath. In fact we believe he gave this as an excuse for stopping his classically chaste remarks. We cannot help remarking that Robert blazed from first to last without the least fraction of applause.
The sharp vetran and tried warrior Dr. Bias15 James J. Gould Bias. here tried to get the floor, if he obtained which he would have excoriated this Purvis most thoroughly.
Mr. Robert Douglass16Probably Robert M. J. Douglass, Jr. (1809–87), son of a British West Indies immigrant to Philadelphia who became a successful hairdresser and leader of that city’s black community. His sister was Sarah Mapps Douglass, an abolitionist and educator. A talented portrait painter, the younger Douglass became active in abolitionism in the 1830s. He visited Haiti and reported positively on conditions there. In the 1850s he was a proponent of immigration to Africa. Julie Winch, Philadelphia’s Black Elite: Activism, Accommodation, and the Struggle for Autonomy, 1787–1848 (Philadelphia, 1988), 5, 35, 50, 61, 83, 94, 129; Merrill and Ruchames, Garrison Letters, 3:60. said he came last year to the Convention in accordance with the general invitation extended and found Spiritualists,17Following the highly publicized claims in 1848 of Margaret and Kate Fox, two sisters from Rochester, New York, to be able to contact the spirits of the deceased via a system of audible “‘rappings,” belief in the powers of mediums to communicate with the dead became widespread across the United States. Andrew Jackson Davis, a prominent medium, worked hard to connect Spiritualism with the abolitionist, temperance, and women’s rights movements of the 1850s. Most abolitionists remained skeptical, but a few, such as the Boston minister John Pierpont and Douglass’s Garrisonian friends Amy and Isaac Post, became staunch believers in Spiritualism. Ronald G. Walters, American Reformers, 1815–1860 (New York, 1978), 163–71; Bret E. Carroll, Spiritualism in Antebellum America (Bloomington, Ind., 1997), 3–4, 248. Colonizationists and others allowed to speak, and he took occasion to make some remarks himself. For this he and his eloquent friend, (Dr. Bias) had been villified in The Standard,18New York National Anti-Slavery Standard. and he mentioned it now in order that the leading members of the Society might have an oppertunity to disclaim sympathy with the course of The Standard.
‘Brother Purvis’ was again on hand playing on his favorite harp, Frederick Douglass. De Wolf interposed, and asked what Mr. Douglass had done to merit such obloquy? Brother Purvis, said he had abused George Thomson, and doing so he has shown himself meanly base and cowardly unprincipled. He then proceeded to say “It is a lie, and the utterer is a liar four or 5 times to De Wolf whom he knew to be non-resistant. De Wolf asked to make an explanation; but ‘Brother Purvis,’ replied that a base
calumniator should not interrupt him[.] The lordly and bombastic air of ‘Brother Purvis,’ excited laughter in De Wolf, to which ‘Brother Purvis,’ answered ‘Laugh! Oh laugh, but it is the forced laugh of conscious dishonesty &c.’ Emboldened by his triumph over a non-resistant, he was proceeding to traduce Mr. R. Douglass, when Mr. D. quietly arose and told ‘Purvis’ that he had called a man whom he knew to be a non-resistant, a liar, and had vilified absent men and dead men, but he could not throw an insult in his (Mr. D’s) teeth without meeting the consequences right on the spot. He might think of it as he chose but he could very easily tell whether he (Mr. D.) was in earnest or not. This effectually cured Purvis of personalities. Very likely this brave man, who is so good at attacking non-resistants, absent men and dead men, might have called to mind an episode a few years ago in Wesley church19Several black churches in antebellum Philadelphia had “Wesley” in their names. The one referred to here is probably the Wesley A.M.E. Zion Church, founded in 1820 and located at the corner of Lombard and Fifth Street. This congregation was one of the oldest in the A.M.E. Zion Church. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899; New York, 1967), 200, 211–12. and another in Heims st.Hall.20Probably the Odd Fellows Hall on the corner of Sixth and Haines Street in Philadelphia. Thefour-story building, erected in 1846 to great fanfare, housed the Grand Lodge offices for Pennsylvania. In addition to several Odd Fellows Lodges, the hall housed the Eclectic Medical College of Pennsylvania. The Odd Fellows erected their building on the same lot where abolitionists had built Pennsylvania Hall, which was burned in 1838. McElroy’s Philadelphia Directory for 1857 (Philadelphia, 1857), 900; [New York] The Golden Rule, and Odd Fellows’ Family Companion, 5:201–02(September 1846). We know nothing about it. He quits his personalities quick enough, when he found he had a man to deal with, that we know.
A lively young man, (whom we know to be a reporter of Forney’s21A prominent Democratic party journalist from Pennsylvania, John Weiss Forney (1817–81) was a close ally of James Buchanan. After losing a race for a seat in the U.S. Senate to the Republican Simeon Cameron, Forney launched a newspaper, the Press, in Philadelphia in August 1857. After quarreling with Buchanan over his efforts to make Kansas a slave state, Forney shifted his allegiance to the Republicans. By 1876, Forney had changed the name of his newspaper from the Press to the Philadelphia Press. North American and United States Gazette, 14 July 1857; Centennial Newspaper Exhibition 1876 (New York, 1876), 277–79; NCAB, 3:267–68; DAB, 6:526–27. paper) whose name we could not learn, now rose and took the house by storm in an eloquent vindication of Frederick Douglass and of George Washington's22In his will, George Washington (1732–99), first president of the United States, provided that all the slaves that he held in his own right be emancipated upon the death of his wife. In 1802, according to the estate inventory, 124 slaves were eventually freed. Fritz Hirschfeld, George Washington and Slavery: A Documentary Portrayal (Columbia, Mo., 1997), 209–12; Douglas Southall Freeman,
Washington: A Biography (New York, 1968), 741. memory. You profess sympathy for the blackman of the South, but you have suffered yourself within the last hour, shamefully to abuse one of the noblest living men, Frederick Doug[l]ass. He had heard every discourse that Mr. Douglass has delivered in this city, and he strained no point when he said, that he was not only the ablest and most eloquent of American orators. But he would redeem his whole race from the charge of inferiority. Shame on you who can suffer that he should be wantonly abused on your platform, which should rather try to strengthen him and hold up his noble hand. Could his noble and manly form but enter the room at this moment, his cowardly calumniators would wilt away before him like the house-vine before the sun! And then General Washington, what is there to be gained by everlastingly traducing the memory of so great and good a man? The American people would not give audience to their doctrines if they embodied such gross calumniations of him who was first in war &c. Every sentiment of Washington was for liberty. Then he went on in the most eloquent and impressive manner. His speech acted like a rocket, (we regret that we could not [learn] the name of this young man.) Remond undertook to reply to it by calling to an account the audience for applauding. Sore yet about his defeat in the Wears23Isaiah C. Weir. discussion last spring, he singled out Prof. R. Cambell,24Born in Jamaica to a free black mother and a Scottish-born planter, Robert Campbell (1829–84) worked as a printer and a teacher before migrating to Brooklyn, New York, in 1852. Three years later, he accepted an instructor’s post at the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia. He was soon drawn into antislavery and Underground Railroad work in that city’s black community. In 1859, Campbell joined Martin Delany’s Niger Valley Exploring Party. After fund-raising on behalf of the expedition in Great Britain, he accompanied Delany to West Africa in 1860. After returning to the United States, he continued to promote African migration in speeches and in writing. In February 1862, Campbell permanently relocated his family to Lagos, Nigeria, where he worked at journalistic and commercial ventures. Blackett, Beating against the Barriers, 139–82. (took him to task for applauding the [l]ast speaker) and charged him with lack of ability to understand the Constitution and laws of the Country, and advised him to go back to the Antilles25The main island group of the West Indies, the Antilles span 2,500 miles from Florida to the Venezuela coast. The archipelago is composed of the Greater Antilles (the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica) and the Lesser Antilles (the Windward Islands, the Leeward Islands, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago). These islands separate the Atlantic Ocean, the Caribbean Sea, and the Gulf of Mexico. Seltzer, Columbia Lippincott Gazetteer of the World, 79; Cohen, Columbia Gazetteer of the World, 3441. and try to comprehend the genius of American institutions before returning.—This was exceedingly smart in Remond, especially as he knew perfectly well that the Prof. would not have an opportunity to reply. We can tell Mr. Remond, that Prof. Campbell’s Scientific and Literary attainments have given him the audience and friendships of some of the most distinguished men of letters, not only in Philadelphia, but in the Country. Remond had better try his hand with him sometime before an impartial audience, and we guess he would come out worse excoriated than he did with Wear last spring.
NORMAL.
PLSr: FDP, 1 January 1858.