THE MODERN NEGRO—NO. II.

DEAR SIR:—I beg to thank your compositor for the general accuracy with which he transferred my miserable scrawl to type. He mistook me, however, in one trivial matter, to which I ask attention. He puts the word "," instead of "," in the sentence where I compare the natives of our fatherland, Africa, with other heathen. I meant to say, they are as descent as any heathen—quite as descent as were the heathen progenitors of the haughty, self-complacent Anglo-Saxons. But, it will become me to complain of your compositor, when he makes you say, in your Tremont Temple Speech, that said, "All that a man hath will he give for his life." while Holy writ attributes that sentence to Satan!

I hope I may rely upon your usual kindness, in allowing me a somewhat wide range in the discussion of this subject.

In addition to what I said in No. I, allow me to add, that, is the time for the negro to vindicate his manhood and his equality to all others, when we see among anti-slavery men, leaders, some of them vital defects, as I deem them. I will, for the present, confine my remarks to but two classes of anti-slavery people, as illustrative of my ideas. I mean the American Quakers and the GarrisonGarrison, William Lloyd

William Lloyd Garrison (1805-79) was the foremost white abolitionist of the nineteenth century and was credited with the discovery of Douglass as a speaker at an antislavery meeting in Nantucket in 1841. He began his career as an apprentice printer on the Newburyport (Mass.) Herald at the age of thirteen. Garrison became editor of the Newburyport Free Press in 1826, but the paper closed within a year. He was then associated with a series of periodicals in Boston that advocated reform before Benjamin Lundy offered the young journalist the opportunity to write for his antislavery newspaper. Garrison joined Lundy in editing the Genius of Universal Emancipation in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1829, during the last year of the paper's 1821-1830 run. In 1830 a libel suit against the editors forced the paper to close and landed Garrison in jail. After his release, he courted the wealthy merchants of New York and Boston in order to start the Liberator (1831-65), a weekly journal based in Boston in which he advocated an immediate end to slavery. Garrison's brand of abolition condemned any institution that would tolerate the existence of slavery, including churches, political parties. and even the United States itself and any scheme aimed at removing black people from the country. Instead, Garrison hoped to raise the public's awareness that slavery was morally wrong and thereby force its end in an almost millennial moment of emancipation. His approach appealed to both white and black antislavery advocates but earned him many enemies among those only moderately opposed to slavery and slaveholders alike. Seeing the need for greater action and organization beyond the pages of the Liberator; Garrison joined with other abolitionists to form the New England Anti-Slavery Society in 1831. Two years later he helped found the larger American Anti-Slavery Society. In 1833 he established ties with English abolitionists after a trip to Great Britain, and he later brought the noted and notorious speaker George Thompson to the United States for a tour. Garrison also dedicated himself to women's rights, encouraging women to enter the public sphere by inviting them, via the Liberator, to form female antislavery societies. In addition to the thirty-three women's antislavery societies that flourished by 1838, Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society welcomed women as well as blacks into its ranks. However, female delegates were excluded from the World's Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840 in London. The issue of women's participation in the antislavery movement and Garrison's absolute refusal to turn to politics to end slavery caused a division in the American Anti-Slavery Society. Brothers Lewis and Arthur Tappan, who opposed women's acting as speakers and who hoped to use politics toward abolition, broke with Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society, forming the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, or the "New Organization" in 1841. Garrison's ideas were so closely associated with the "Old Organization" that the American Anti-Slavery Society became known simply as the "Garrisonians." With the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, Garrison believed that he had accomplished his life's work and that of the antislavery movement. He then resigned from the presidency of the American Anti-Slavery Society and closed the Liberator. Wendell Phillips Garrison and Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879: The Story of His Life Told by His Children, 4 vols. (New York, 188589); Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York, 1998); James Brewer Stewart, William Lloyd Garrison and the Challenge of Emancipation (Arlington Heights, Ill., 1992); John L. Thomas, The Liberator: William Lloyd Garrison (Boston, 1963); Dictionary of American Biography, 20 vols. (New York, 1928-36), 7:168-72. Abolitionists. Other [illegible] are as bad, but I choose to refer just now to these. Of the former, I think it may be said without the fear of contradiction, that the idea of the equal manhood of the negro is as foreign to their bosoms as to those of some other sect in America. They have purged their sect of slaveholders, they render their annual testimony against slavery, and they steadfastly refuse either to hold or to hire slaves, when they reside in the South. But they have yet to present the first iota of practical evidence of their regarding the negro as equal to themselves. They are a very upright, genteel, proud sect. They, therefore, never stoop to join in mobs, not even in . Nor do they ever condescend to join in low, vulgar, ribald abuse of the negro. What they do is done gently, religiously. But they never do that which anyone can possible mistake for an absence of fashionable contempt for and disparagement of the negro. They will give us good advice; they will aid in giving us a partial education—but never in a Quaker school, beside their own children. Whatever they do for us, savors of pity, and is done at arm's length, on a sort of principle. They raise a negro boy to a clerkship? or put him in a profession? or fit him for anything more than a drudge? Never! They would sooner put on a narrow brim or an straight coat. You and I know, sir, some most glorious exceptions to this rule. The more glorious, exceptions, but the rule holds good. If nothing is done for us than what Quakers in America do, God save us!

I believe the sect in question are more numerous in Pennsylvania and New York, than in any other two States. I regret to say, that from my own observation and experiennce in those two States, no sect produces specimens of deeper, more determined, and what is no better, more religious negro-haters than does that sect of Friends called Quakers.

Well, now, let us look at some fact touching Garrison Abolitionists. You may be aware that I prolong my stay in Europe, in attending to private business, which relieves me, I hope, from the temptation (if I ever was assailed by it) of courting popular favor. And, did I desire to be at midlife, what I never was in past days, a popular man among my own people, I should make it entirely impossible by this article. For some of the black people think the Quakers and Garrisonians worthy of almost as much praise as their Maker. They would "do, be, or suffer," as the grammar says, anything at the nod of either of these classes. They scarcely think them capable of doing wrong. Now, at the risk of the censure of this class of our people, I beg to state that the class referred to, do not, except in words—mere words, believe in negro equality, nor is it a natural result of their movements to inspire negroes with any such idea, but rather to repress it. There now! I have said it! Now I must look out for breakers! I am prepared. Hear me. 1. No black man [having?] been encouraged either as a clerk in an anti-slavery office, or editor, or lecturer to its same extent as have white men of the same calibre. What I published on that subject in 1850, has never been denied, for the best of all reasons—it was, and is, undeniable—What Dr. Smith says on that subject, to the same effect, is gently put into the pro-slavery columns of the , as printers put bad types into an inverted old [row?] called h—, but that is not contradiction much less refutation. Nell, Still, and others were kept subordinates, always. No [illegible] Garrisonian can get $1200 a year as [editor?] I am not so well acquainted with lecturers salaries; but I know of no black man and his wife, who, through courtship to marriage and then for years after have lived as salaried agents of either of the Garrison societies. Whites have.

2. What was the animus of Parker Pillsbury's strictures upon Dr. Pennington, Rev. H. H. Garnet and myself? Why, it seemed that we three Maryland lads had been to England, had said that Garrison and his coadjutors were infidels, and had actually been well received where he had not!! Now honest anti-abolitionists would have called all this in plain, unmistakable, uncanting language, "negro insolence." Who does not see that is just what Mr. Pillsbury meant? Mr. P. goes on to complain that we have collected money for colored churches and for fugitive slaves, where he cannot collect for the American Anti-Slavery Society and then tells the that we ought not to have money for any such purposes, but it ought to be given to his Society. "?" is the English of that. But more, Dr. Pennington belongs to the Presbyterian Church, Mr. Garnett has settled in a Parish in Jamaica, and Mr. Pillsbury "is informed" that I am going to settle as a planted in Jamaica. He says that were we abolitionists, we should neither settle [illegible] parishes nor upon plantations. Of course, then, we are not abolitionists, i. e. we are not subject to the dictation of Mr. Pillsbury and his coadjutors. I as, once more, is not this the animus of the oversee? Is it at all akin to the idea that a negro is so equal as a an Anglo-Saxon, that he may go where he pleases, move his own field and method of labor, and succeed as well as he can? No!—The chief complaint against us is, that [we] do succeed, and, possibly, may do yet more. What did we run away from Maryland for?

To succeed or fail? You and Dr. P. and Garnet are answering that question daily.

By the way, I wrote, in December last, a reply to Mr. Pillsbury's article in the Glasgow paper, and sent it to a paper . That is the last I have heard of it.

3. One need only refer to the fact, that young Cassey was refused a place in a rich Garrisonian's counting-house, because of his ! That gentleman being at one time (if not now) President of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, and belonging to a family whose anti-slavery profession is louder than that of any other family of Hicksite Quakers in Pennsylvania. It seem, too, that young Purvis has been rejected in a like manner.

4. Now for the influence of all this on the blacks. When Cassey was rejected by Davis, I was in Philadelphia. I denounced it, and it was justified by a young colored man of high standing. So was the treatment of Nell and Still in the anti slavery offices.

Again, when you dared to take your present position upon the anti-slavery question, by whom were you denounced more bitterly than by two prominent colored gentlemen of that school? Now, just so far as that class of abolitionists have influenced at all over our people, they repress rather than inspire the idea of equality. Hence the value of your defense of this great principle. Hence the appropriateness of making that defense, most vigorously, now. Hence, also, allow me to thank you, once more for your Ethnological Lecture.

I beg to remain your obedient servant,

S. R. W.

LONDON, March, 1855.