Speeches_volume_1_front_matter
THE FREDERICK DOUGLASS PAPERS
VOLUME 1: 1841-46
[Portrait of Frederick Douglass in the printed volume not included here]
Frederick Douglass, attributed to Elisha Hammond, c. 1844.
Reproduced by permission of the National Portrait Gallery,
Smithsonian Institution.
THE
FREDERICK DOUGLASS
PAPERS
John W. Blassingame, Editor
C. Peter Ripley, Associate Editor
Lawrence N. Powell, Fiona E. Spiers,
and Clarence L. Mohr, Assistant Editors
Julie S. Jones and Carla B. Carr, Assistants in Research
New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1979
The preparation of this volume of the Frederick Douglass Papers was made possible grants from the Editing Program of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Historical Publications and Records Commission, and Yale through the National University.
Copyright © 1979 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in
whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S.
Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the
publishers.
Designed by John O. C. McCrillis
and set in Times Roman type.
Printed in the United States of America by
The Vail-Ballou Press, Inc., Binghamton, New York.
Published in Great Britain, Europe, Africa, and Asia (except Japan) by Yale University Press, Ltd.,
London. Distributed in Australia and New Zealand by Book & Film Services, Artarmon, N.S.W.,
Australia; and in Japan by Harper & Row, Publishers, Tokyo Office.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Douglass, Frederick, 18177-1895.
The Frederick Douglass papers.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Slavery in the United States—Anti-slavery move
ments—Collected works.
Collected works.
E449.D733
2. Afro-Americans—History—
3. Douglass, Frederick, 18177-1895.
322.4'4'0924
ISBN 0-300-02246-8
78-16687
EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction to Series One
Introduction to Volume 1
Editorial Method
Partial Speaking Itinerary, 1839-46
xi
XV
xix
xxi
lxxi
lxxiii
lxxxvii
SPEECHES
?/October
4 November
4 November
26 January
28 January
25 May
9 May
11 February
6 May
1841
I Have Come to Tell You Something about Slavery
Lynn, Mass.
The Union, Slavery, and Abolitionist Petitions
Hingham, Mass.
American Prejudice and Southern Religion
Hingham, Mass.
1842
Abolitionists and Third Parties
Boston, Mass.
The Southern Style of Preaching to Slaves
Boston, Mass.
The Church Is the Bulwark of Slavery
Boston, Mass.
1843
The Anti-Slavery Movement, the Slave's Only
Earthly Hope
New York, N.Y.
3
5
9
13
15
17
20
1844
Southern Slavery and Northern Religion
Concord, N.H.
23
1845
My Slave Experience in Maryland
New York, N.Y.
27
vii
Viii
1 October
14 October
14 October
17 October
20 October
23 October
3 November
10 November
5 December
11 December
23 December
2 January
6 January
15 January
30 January
12 February
18 February
10 March
17 March
CONTENTS
Irish Christians and Non-Fellowship with ManStealers
Dublin, Ire.
My Experience and My Mission to Great Britain
Cork, Ire.
I Am Here to Spread Light on American Slavery
Cork, Ire.
Slavery Corrupts American Society and Religion
Cork, Ire.
Intemperance and Slavery
Cork, Ire.
American Prejudice against Color
Cork, Ire.
The Annexation of Texas
Cork, Ire.
Slavery and America's Bastard Republicanism
Limerick, Ire.
The Cambria Riot, My Slave Experience, and My
Irish Mission
Belfast, Ire.
The Slanderous Charge of Negro Inferiority
Belfast, Ire.
Baptists, Congregationalists, the Free Church, and
Slavery
Belfast, Ire.
1846
Texas, Slavery, and American Prosperity
Belfast, Ire.
The Bible Opposes Oppression, Fraud, and Wrong
Belfast, Ire.
An Account of American Slavery
Glasgow, Scot.
The Free Church of Scotland and American Slavery
Dundee, Scot.
The Free Church Connection with the Slave Church
Arbroath, Scot.
Intemperance Viewed in Connection with Slavery
Glasgow, Scot.
Charges and Defense of the Free Church
Dundee, Scot.
International Moral Force Can Destroy Slavery
Paisley, Scot.
34
36
39
45
55
59
71
76
86
97
103
118
126
131
144
156
165
171
183
CONTENTS
19 March
20 March
24 March
30 March
6 April
17 April
21 April
25 April
1 May
18 May
19 May
21 May
22 May
4 June
29 June
3 August
7 August
ix
The Free States, Slavery, and the Sin of the Free
Church
Paisley, Scot.
The Relation of the Free Church to the Slave
Church
Paisley, Scot.
A Few Facts and Personal Observations of Slavery
Ayr, Scot.
Temperance and Anti-Slavery
Paisley, Scot.
America's Compromise with Slavery and the Aboli
tionists' Work
Paisley, Scot.
British Influence on the Abolition Movement in
America
Paisley, Scot.
The Free Church Alliance with Man-Stealers
Glasgow, Scot.
Send Back the Blood-Stained Money
Paisley, Scot.
American and Scottish Prejudice against the Slave
Edinburgh, Scot.
Emancipation Is an Individual, a National, and an
International Responsibility
London, Eng.
My Opposition to War
London, Eng.
The Temperance Cause in America and Britain
London, Eng.
American Slavery, American Religion, and the Free
Church of Scotland
London, Eng.
The Views of Southern Churches on Slavery
Edinburgh, Scot.
Slavery Attacks Humanity
Birmingham, Eng.
Slavery, the Free Church, and British Agitation
against Bondage
Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Eng.
The American Temperance Movement, Slavery,
and Prejudice
London, Eng.
186
189
195
205
209
215
231
240
243
249
261
264
269
300
308
316
339
x
CONTENTS
25 August
28 August
31 August
1 September
2 September
11 September
14 September
18 September
23 September
24 September
30 September
6 October
12 October
19 October
23 December
Appendixes
Index
Slavery as It Now Exists in the United States
Bristol, Eng.
A Call for the British Nation to Testify against
Slavery
Exeter, Eng.
American Slavery and Britain's Rebuke of ManStealers
Bridgwater, Eng.
The Horrors of Slavery and England's Duty to Free
the Bondsman
Taunton, Eng.
Slavery and the American Churches
Bristol, Eng.
A Simple Tale of American Slavery
Sheffield, Eng.
Slavery in the Pulpit of the Evangelical Alliance
London, Eng.
American Slavery, American Churches, and the
Evangelical Alliance
Sunderland, Eng.
The General Assembly of the Free Church
Paisley, Scot.
The Slaveholders' Maneuverings at the Evangelical
Alliance
Edinburgh, Scot.
Slavery, the Evangelical Alliance, and the Free
Church
Glasgow, Scot.
Defenders of Slavery at the Evangelical Alliance
Belfast, Ire.
Evangelical Man-Stealers
Manchester, Eng.
Slavery Exists under the Eaves of the American
Church
Liverpool, Eng.
England Should Lead the Cause of Emancipation
Leeds, Eng.
•
341
352
363
371
381
398
407
417
426
434
441
453
459
466
474
487
499
Preface
The year 1818 was a momentous one in American history: Congress
adopted the present design of the United States flag, Charles Bulfinch
began work on the national capitol, Congress passed the first Pension
Act, and Illinois entered the Union as a free state. Sometime in February that same year Harriet Bailey, a twenty-six-year-old slave belonging
to Capt. Aaron Anthony of Talbot County, Maryland, gave birth to a
son, Frederick Augustus Washington. Although Anthony recorded only
the sparsest details in his list of "My Black People[s'] Ages, " it provides historians with the first glimpse of the man who was to become
known to the world as Frederick Douglass.
Contemporary Americans and most historians generally recognize
Frederick Douglass as the representative black man of the nineteenth
century. Escaping from Maryland slavery in 1838, Douglass settled in
New Bedford, Massachusetts. Four years later he moved to Lynn, Massachusetts, and in 1847 took up residence in Rochester, New York,
where he made his home until 1872. He spent the last years of his life in
Washington, D.C. This Maryland-born slave was such an important
public figure in the nineteenth century that five state legislatures adopted
resolutions of regret when he died in 1895. Beginning his long public
career in 1841 as an agent of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society,
Douglass subsequently edited several newspapers and participated in
many reform movements. He was the only man to play a prominent role
at the 1848 Seneca Falls meeting, which formally launched the women's
rights movement; he opposed war, capital punishment, lynching, peon
age, and the convict lease system, and was a temperance advocate. A
staunch defender of the Liberty and Republican parties, Douglass held
several political appointments, frequently corresponded with leading
politicians, and advised Presidents Lincoln, Grant, Hayes, and Garfield.
He met with John Brown before his abortive raid on Harpers Ferry,
helped to recruit black troops during the Civil War, served as consul in
Haiti, and attended most black conventions held between 1840 and
1895. His correspondents resided in practically every state in the Union,
as well as in England, Scotland, Haiti, Nicaragua, France, Ireland,
Canada, Denmark, and Central America; they included slaveholders and
fugitive slaves, poets and politicians, and hundreds of relatively obscure
blacks and whites.
Douglass had a long and distinguished career as a writer and journalist. In 1847 he began editing the North Star in Rochester, New York,
changing the name of his journal to Frederick Douglass' Paper in 1851,
and continuing to edit it until 1860. Between 1858 and 1863 he also
published Douglass' Monthly Magazine. After the Civil War he continued his journalistic endeavors, publishing a newspaper, the New National Era, in Washington, D.C., and several essays in national magazines. He occasionally served as a regular correspondent for newspapers
before and after the Civil War, wrote one novella and three autobiographies.
Douglass was not only a representative black man, he stood for
what was best in American ideals; the document he loved most was the
Declaration of Independence. He was an advocate of morality, economic accumulation, self-help, and equality. His belief in racial pride,
constant agitation against racial discrimination, vocational education for
blacks, nonviolent passive resistance, recognition of the separateness of
the black "nation within a nation," and integration of blacks in American society antedated twentieth-century black nationalists, Booker T.
Washington's emphasis on vocational education and economic self-help,
W. E. B. Du Bois's calls for protest, and Martin Luther King's nonviolent direct action.
Recognizing Douglass's importance in American history, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (then under the
able leadership of Oliver Wendell Holmes) began discussing the possibility of collecting and editing his widely scattered and voluminous
papers with Charles Wesley, Executive Director of the Association for
the Study of Afro-American Life and History in 1970. On 25 May 1970
the commission adopted a resolution that it considered "as especially
urgent and deserving high priority the collection and publication of the
papers of Frederick Douglass." Mr. Wesley invited me to Washington
to discuss the commission resolution early in 1971. After subsequent
discussions with officers of the association, the commission, and Yale
University, the Frederick Douglass Papers Project, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Yale University, and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, began in September 1973.
A comprehensive edition of the Douglass Papers will be published
in three series: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews will constitute Series
One; Published Writings will be included in Series Two; and Letters
will appear in Series Three. We decided to publish the papers in three
series for a number of reasons. Paramount was our desire to make available some of the documents we collected relatively early in the project.
We completed our search for speeches first because they were the easiest documents to locate. Letters and published writings, on the other
hand, have been considerably more elusive. Two calamities contributed
to this problem. First, in 1872 Douglass's Rochester home burned, destroying most of the antebellum letters written to him and the only complete runs of his newspapers. Second, Douglass's papers were neglected
after his death in 1895. By the middle of the twentieth century private
collectors had garnered some of them, and a number of his letters were
pasted on the walls of various government offices in Washington, D.C.
There is no central repository for Douglass's letters. While the Library
of Congress has the largest single collection, most of Douglass's extant
letters were distributed in hundreds of archives in Europe, the United
States, and Canada, and in numerous journals, books, and pamphlets
when we began collecting them in 1973.
It became quickly apparent that it would take many years for us to
locate most of Douglass's extant letters. At the same time, we had only
found about 60 percent of the 320 missing issues of his journals during
the first three years of the project. By 1976 we were reasonably confident that we had located more than 90 percent of Douglass's speeches we were likely to find. These documents, we felt, should be made accessible to the public. While making them available, we could continue our search for Douglass's newspapers and his widely scattered letters and published writings.
The internal unity gained from publishing the papers in series would
be lost by arranging them chronologically. The speeches show Douglass
the orator—the techniques he used to sway audiences, the logical and
emotional appeals he made to them. Douglass the essayist appears in the
published writings, where he utilized his pen rather than his voice to educate, lead, and cajole. In the letters we see the meshing of the private
and public Douglass. We hope that our series introductions and the documents themselves will yield a more varied portrait of the man and his
times than would a strict chronological approach.
We begin with Douglass's speeches, debates, and interviews.
Douglass was such a peripatetic orator—speaking in hundreds of towns
in twenty-five states and several foreign countries (Italy, Egypt, Canada,
Haiti, and Great Britain) between 1841 and 1895—it is unlikely that all
of his speeches will ever be found. But we have searched systematically
for them. When others come to light, we hope that interested students
will bring our attention to them. Local historians with access to journals
and archives we may not have explored will find the itineraries published with each volume of speeches helpful in their own efforts to
locate addresses Douglass delivered in their towns.
The speeches, debates, and interviews we located are presented in
Series One. Reflecting Douglass's intellectual odyssey, these documents
include many new temperance, women's rights, scientific, economic,
education, and political addresses. The first full copies of Douglass's
famous slaveholder's sermon to slaves, numerous prewar speeches on
his relationship with John Brown, his attitudes toward American Indians
and slave rebellions, and a large number of remarkably modern and
sophisticated analyses of slavery, European affairs, the Civil War, Reconstruction, American politics, lynching, and diplomacy will appear in
these volumes for the first time. It is far easier to note the number of
topics covered by the speeches than to convey any sense of the new information they contain about Douglass and the nineteenth century. One
is struck by what they reveal of Douglass's keen sense of humor. Many
of the early speeches are autobiographical in nature and consequently
reveal many new aspects of his life as a slave and as a free man. New
information on British and American reform movements, the nature of
slavery and freedom, and the twisting contours of nineteenth-century
politics and race relations challenge many of our conventional analyses
of these topics and of Douglass's role in many aspects of life in the
nineteenth century.
J. W. B.
[John W. Blassingame]
Acknowledgments
The Frederick Douglass Papers Project has been a cooperative venture
from the outset. Douglass's descendants, Frederick S. Weaver, Ann
Tebeau, Fannie H. Douglass, and the late Joseph H. Douglass gave
freely of their time and advice. Charles Wesley, J. Rupert Picott, Edgar
Toppin, and Charles Walker Thomas of the Association for the Study of
Afro-American Life and History have been consistently encouraging.
The Directors of the National Historical Publications and Records
Commission, Oliver Wendell Holmes, E. Berkeley Tompkins, and
Frank Burke, along with Ronald Berman and Simone Reagor of the National Endowment for the Humanities, gave unsparingly of their time
trying to clear up the mysteries of fund raising and proposal writing.
The staff of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, and especially Fred Shelley and Sara Jackson, always lent a
sympathetic ear and gave a cheering word. The commission's archivists,
led by Sara Jackson, uncovered scores of Douglass documents we
would have otherwise missed.
Colleagues in the Afro-American Studies and American Studies Programs and the History Department cheerfully pointed us to sources
providing answers to what we considered the most obscure (or unanswerable) questions. Duncan Rice and Sidney Ahlstrom helped us
straighten out the tangled accounts of denominational disputes and Scottish reform. Douglas Riach of the University of Edinburgh graciously
gave us access to his unpublished dissertation on Irish abolitionists and
discussed Irish history with us.
Our colleagues in the library all went out of their way to make our
work easier. Susan Steinberg and Andrea Ozment greeted our most outrageous acquisitions and interlibrary loan requests with equanimity; they
acquired what we needed with dispatch.
Newspaper research is often viewed by historians as potentially the
most rewarding and usually the most tedious of work. Dozens of graduate and undergraduate students at Yale and other colleges and universities spent weeks on end ploughing through dusty tomes or reels of
microfilm searching for Douglass documents and annotational material.
Among the Yale undergraduates, Donald Woodall, Mitchell Crusto,
Wendy Jones, Marcia Finkelstein, James Singleton, Cynthia Watson,
Peter Bollier, and Bart Steinfeld set the tone for dedication and accuracy. Michelle Anderson, Ruth Good, Devon Miller, Carter Eskew, Marsha Moseley, Joanne Payton, Bruce Piersawl, Brent Raulerson, Kenneth Noble, Judith Hall, Phyllis Eckaus, Christi Eng, Mark Gallegos, Elizabeth Hillyer, Nan Helm, and Klara Glowczewski followed
the same excellent standards. Patricia Bates of Spelman College brought
unfailing good humor to a thankless task. Yale graduate students Harold
Cooke, Glenn May, Daniel Meaders, Horace Porter, and Barbara Riley
also spent part of their summers in the Microfilm Reading Room. Emily
Grundy of Cambridge, England, began the search for Douglass speeches
printed in British newspapers, while Rosemary Sibley of Cornell University, Kevin Vaughn of the University of Pennsylvania, Frank R.
Levstik of Ohio State University, Robert Paquette of the University of
Rochester, Nell Sherman of Springfield, Illinois, Donna McNally of
Brown University, Betty Lou Rathbun of the University of Buffalo,
Richard Ruvelson of the University of Wisconsin, Martha D. Burns of
Ann Arbor, Michigan, Jean Johnson of the New Hampshire Historical
Society, and James N. Rogers of Indianapolis, Indiana, combed through
American newspapers.
Our Assistants in Research, Carla B. Carr, Julie S. Jones, and
Teresa McAlpine contributed far more to the success of the project
than their title indicates. At various times they reconstructed Douglass's
itinerary, wrote abstracts of his editorials, tracked down his speeches,
wrote headnotes for and annotated his addresses, and copyedited our
prose. We are indebted to Karen Greenberg for the index.
The best way to acknowledge the services of Clarence L. Mohr (National Historical Publications and Records Commission Editing Fellow
in 1975-76), Lawrence N. Powell, and C. Peter Ripley is to say that
they have often been surrogate editors. Although Peter Ripley left the
project for Florida State University in 1976, he contributed to the development of the search guidelines for Douglass documents, the editorial
method, and the introduction for Series One. In our frequent and long
discussions of editorial policy Peter's good sense and good humor saved
us from eternal wrangles. Fiona Spiers of Leeds drove all over Great
Britain hunting for Douglass speeches and annotational material. Following the smallest clues, she turned up information on the most obscure
of the obscure.
As in most editing projects, the unsung heroes and heroines of the
Douglass Papers are the hundreds of librarians in the United States,
Canada, and Great Britain who answered what must at times have
seemed our interminable requests for documents. While we will acknowledge them specifically in subsequent series, we cannot let pass
this opportunity to thank Clifton Johnson of Dillard University, Dorothy
Porter and Michael Winston of Howard University, Phebe R. Jacobsen
of the Maryland Hall of Records, Mattie Russell of Duke University,
Gerald Parsons of the Syracuse Public Library, Ben C. Bowman of the
Johns Hopkins University, and Karl Kabelac of the University of Rochester whose assistance helped us to solve many of the problems we encountered in completing Series One.
We were singularly fortunate in coming to the attention of several people who knew of and had Douglass documents. Without waiting to be contacted, they searched their attics, files, and notes and unselfishly shared whatever information they had with us. Warren F. Broderick of Lansingburgh, New York, Romeo B. Garrett of Bradley University,
Peter Goldman of Newsweek, Sammy Miller of Bowie State College, John E. Stealey, III, of Shepherd College, David Williams of
Bethesda, Maryland, James Abajian of San Francisco, California, Robert Babcock of Wells College, Charles L. Blockson of Norristown,
Pennsylvania, Bell I. Wiley of Emory University, and June Patton of
Governor's State University very generously sent us numerous documents used in Series One. Dickson J. Preston of Easton, Maryland,
helped to clarify many aspects of Talbot County and Maryland history.
The members of the Board of Editorial Advisors have given aid, encouragement, and counsel. They were unobtrusive when we needed
time to wrestle with problems and quick to respond when we asked for
directions.
Dolores H. Canty, Elizabeth Dailinger, Robert W. Reilly, Shirley
Mero, and Gwen Williams typed the documents and notes. Switching
almost daily from nineteenth-century newspaper type (with magnifying
glass in hand) to our handwritten notes (most of which would come in
last in any calligraphy contest) they typed draft after draft of the manuscript. Somehow they managed to keep track of all our "final" copies, proofread them, and remain cheerful in spite of it all.
Teasie, Martha, Diana, Edward, Janet, James, and Paul shared our
editorial joys and disappointments. We benefitted greatly from their patience and understanding.
THE FREDERICK DOUGLASS PAPERS
VOLUME 1: 1841-46