FREDERICK DOUGLASS TO JOHN WEISS FORNEY¹The New York Independent indicated that this letter was written to the editor of the Philadelphia Press, John Weiss Forney (1817–81). A prominent Democratic party journalist from Pennsylvania, Forney had been a close ally of James Buchanan. From 1851 to 1855 he served as clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives while also editing the Union, a pro–Democratic party newspaper in the capital. After losing the race for a seat in the U.S. Senate to Simeon Cameron, a Republican, Forney launched a new newspaper, the Press, in Philadelphia in August 1857. After quarreling with Buchanan over his efforts to make Kansas a slave state, Forney shifted allegiance to the Republicans. From 1859 to 1861 he was again the clerk of the House, and he published a second newspaper, the Chronicle, in Washington. During the Civil War, Forney’s Chronicle was highly supportive of the Lincoln administration, but during Reconstruction he broke with Andrew Johnson and endorsed impeachment. In 1868, Forney returned to Pennsylvania and changed the name of his newspaper from the Press to the Philadelphia Press; he was still the paper’s editor during the U.S. centennial celebrations. North American and United States Gazette, 14 July 1857; Centennial Newspaper Exhibition, 1876 (New York, 1876), 277–79; J. Thomas Scharf and Thompson Westcott, History of Philadelphia, 1609–1884, 3 vols. (Philadelphia, 1884), 3: 2026–27; NCAB, 3: 267–68; DAB, 6: 526–27.

[Washington, D.C. 21 June 1870.]

Trials for heresy in our day and country, where liberty of thought and
speech are conceded to the humblest member of society, are usually
deemed farcical, if not harmless. It was once, indeed, a fearful thing to
fall into the hands of the church. History proves that there is no malice
and cruelty so bitter and unrelenting as that malice and cruelty which
clothes itself in saintly robes, and professes to be “contending for the faith
once delivered to the saints.”²Jude 1: 3. A few centuries ago the weapons of religion
against heresy were carnal enough. “Cord and steel,” “fire and sword,”
“halter and rack” were the chosen instruments.³Douglass refers to forms of torture employed by medieval and early modern Roman Catholic Inquisition courts to extract confessions of heresy. Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (New Haven, Conn., 1998), 189–90. Thanks, not to faith, but
to the enlightenment of the age and the growth of rational ideas among
men, to differ with the church to-day does not bring torture and physical
death. The worst that bigotry can now do is to assail reputation and fill
the mouths of the vulgar crowd with meaningless epithets. There is no
doubt that religious malice is the same to-day as three hundred years ago.
It would bite, sting, and devour now, as then, if it only had the power. It
would crush living flesh to-day with the same sanctimonious ferocity as it
does reputation. The will to do is manifest; the power only is wanting. The
church and the street are about the same in point of authority and in point
of excellence. Both are ever on the side of popular wrong, and both are

against unpopular right. The condemnations, maledictions, and denunciations of the church, whether Bethel or St. Peter’s,⁴The original basilica of St. Peter’s was constructed by order of the Emperor Constantine in the fourth century. The building underwent major renovations during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including the construction of its massive dome, designed by Michelangelo Buonarroti. As the home church of the bishop of Rome, the pontiff, St. Peter’s became a symbol for the central administration of the Roman Catholic Church. John Murray, A Handbook of Rome and Its Environs (London, 1867), 194–210. to the outside world,
have no more significance than the vulgar curses of the crowd.⁵American Methodists founded the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1784, creating national autonomy for their denomination. Many free blacks were attracted to the Methodist Church for its inclusiveness; however, as the institution of slavery grew, so did racial discrimination within American Methodist congregations. In 1787, the black members of St. George’s Church in Philadelphia withdrew after white congregants attempted to forcibly remove Absalom Jones, Richard Allen, and William White to the area surrounding the church walls as the men knelt in prayer. This incident became the catalyst for the formation of two black churches in Philadelphia: an Episcopal church, St. Thomas, where Jones served as rector; and the Bethel African Methodist Church, led by Allen but governed by the white leadership of St. George’s. Both churches were dedicated in 1794, but disputes between Bethelites and the white elders were frequent and bitter. Facing similar problems within their Methodist congregations, black Methodists in Baltimore established their Bethel Church in 1797. Daniel Coker assumed leadership of the Baltimore church in 1801. Allen and Coker together started the independent African Methodist movement in America; by 1816, several black Methodist congregations were in existence. Representatives of these congregations met at Bethel, Philadelphia, in April 1816 and resolved to form a separate body, the African Methodist Episcopal Church of the United States of America. While adhering to most of the Methodist discipline, the African Methodist Episcopal Church emphasized and continues to dedicate itself to education, political agitation, and social action. Daniel A. Payne, Recollections of Seventy Years (Nashville, Tenn., 1888); James T. Campbell, Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa (New York, 1995), 10–14; Harry V. Richardson, Dark Salvation: The Story of Methodism as It Developed among Blacks in America (Garden City, N.Y., 1976), 62–116; George A. Singleton, The Romance of African Methodism: A Study of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (New York, 1952), 1–25; ACAB, 4: 685; NCAB, 4: 188; DANB, 484. It may be
said of Bethel as of other religious bodies, they are “naught but men and
women,” and no wiser or better than other men and women.

Without consulting the confused, incoherent, illogical, and strangely-worded resolutions, so characteristic of Bethel, by which the attempt is
made to degrade men among the colored people, I will here give the substance of what I did say on the evening of the 29th of April, in Horticultural Hall,⁶Douglass spoke in Philadelphia’s Horticultural Hall on 26 April 1870 at a celebration for the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment. Douglass was part of a procession of African Americans so long that it took over an hour to pass through the city streets. Washington National Republican, 27 April 1870. and which I take to be the very head and front of my
offending.⁷The phrase “the very head and front of my offending” is from Othello, act 1, sc. 3.

I regarded, received, and treated the deliverance of the colored people of this country from bondage, their elevation to citizenship, and their
subsequent enfranchisement under the Fifteenth Amendment, not as a
miracle, nor due to any special interposition of Divine Providence but as
resulting from the certain operation of natural causes inherent in the very
constitution of human nature. As slavery was created by human selfishness, so slavery was abolished by human justice, wisdom, benevolence.
Such was my view, and such is the “dangerous sentiment” to which I gave
utterance. Had I come out with some “ram’s horn” story,⁸Douglass probably alludes to the shofar, a musical instrument frequently mentioned in the Old Testament in connection with religious observances. Exod. 19: 16, Ps. 81: 3, Lev. 25: 9. some dream or
vision, or presumptuous assertion as to the ways of Divine Providence,
about which men speculate forever and settle nothing, I might have escaped the censures of my Bethel brothers, and perhaps passed along for
a very pious man. If I had said that God had abolished slavery in answer
to the prayers of the American Church and pulpit, a body which has done
more to protect slavery and give it respectability than all other influences
combined; if I had said that foremost among the instrumentalities which
gave liberty to the American bondman were the sermons and prayers of
“Big Bethel,” a church which closed its doors against abolition in the hour
of its extremest need.⁹Fearing mob attack, most of Philadelphia’s black congregations had not welcomed antislavery meetings in their sanctuaries. In 1848, Douglass had criticized not only the Bethel A.M.E. Church, but two other African American congregations in Philadelphia—St. Thomas Episcopal Church and Central Presbyterian Church—as well for not permitting visiting abolitionists to make speeches from their pulpits. In the North Star, Douglass sparked a public dispute with the Reverend William Douglass of St. Thomas’s over such restrictions, and the pressure forced these churches to adopt a more welcoming attitude toward abolitionism. NASS, 19 October 1948; NS, 27 October 1848; Julie Winch, Philadelphia’s Black Elite: Activism, Accommodation, and the Struggle for Autonomy, 1787–1848 (Philadelphia, 1988), 155–66. I should have spoken against fact, but should have
received a cheering amen from Bishop Campbell.¹⁰Jabez P. Campbell. I, however, professed
no knowledge of the agency of prayer in the great revolution which has
taken place; but spoke simply of the natural moral forces of human society, and their tendency to the noble, the true, and the good. I spoke only
as a reformer, understanding the wisdom of adapting means to ends, and
believing, if this sin cursed earth is ever to be made better, it is to be made
so by faithful exertion and wise application of human energies. Moral, not
less than physical, evils are under the control of man. When anything is to
be done in this world, some denizen of this world has got to do it, or it will

go undone. We are under inexorable law, unchangeable and eternal, and
“whatever a man soweth that shall he reap.”¹¹Gal. 6: 7. The American people violated the law of justice, love, and liberty; and in due time that law, written
in the human soul, vindicated itself, through war, blood and pestilence.

But why could I not join in the loud hallelujahs and thanksgiving on
the 26th of April, and thus have escaped the dreadful censures which have
since been heaped upon me? I will tell you. Because I would not stultify
myself. During the forty years of moral effort to overthrow slavery in
this country, that system, with all its hell-black horrors and crimes, found
no more secure shelter anywhere than amid the popular religious cant of
the day. One honest Abolitionist was a greater terror to slaveholders than
whole acres of camp-meeting preachers shouting glory to God.

Years ago, when denouncing the pro-slavery attitude of the church
(and Bethel among the rest, for it too was in the South, preaching, “Servants, obey your masters!”)¹²Eph. 6: 5–9. it was predicted that the day would come
when the churches of this country would claim the honor of abolishing
slavery. They already do so. Knowing their time-serving and cowardly
subserviency to slavery, and knowing Bethel to be like unto the rest, I
could give no countenance to its pretensions. Hence I declare, what I believe the literal truth, that the abolition of slavery is due to natural causes.

Again, if we may venture upon such a question, admit, if we must,
that God abolished slavery (and we must concede that he did that important work only as he does all things else) one act of his must be esteemed
to be as wise and as beneficial as another. A finite creature has no right
to discriminate between the acts of an infinite God. Do not all his acts
accord with an infinite purpose? And is not this purpose eternally right?
Who shall therefore sit in judgment upon the works of God? Unless we
are prepared for this, have we not the same duty to thank God for slavery
as for the abolition of slavery? Our divines, North and South, a few years
ago, told us that slavery was of Divine appointment. Did “Big Bethel” then
thank God for slavery? Did she call upon the slave in his chains to praise
the Lord for the bloody lash that tore his quivering flesh? Why not, if God
established slavery? If we assume to thank God for one of his acts, we
must thank him for all.

Very evidently, Mr. Editor, my Bethel brethren have opened up a large
subject—far too large, I fear, for the limits of your paper, if not for the
limits of Bethel intellect and theological learning. Being no theologian
myself, I confine my public utterances to things more comprehensible.
When a wrong thing has been done, I know that men have done it, and that

somebody is to blame for it. I know, too, that when a right thing has been
done somebody has done it—somebody to whom praise and blame are
of some consequence, and that awarding or withholding it may in some
degree affect the conduct of other responsible beings for good. The way
is clear to do this, since it is natural, and involves no doubt, darkness, nor
contradiction. If I am wrong in all this, I shall be very glad to be set right,
and will even return thanks to my Bethel brethren for enlightenment. But
I warn them that hard names, threats, and denunciations, even though they
should drive me outside their ranks and take from me the title of “leader
of the colored people”—a title I never assumed and do not claim—will
only leave me just where I am.

PLe: Washington , 21 June 1870; Other texts in New York ,7
July 1870; Washington , 14 July 1880.