John Jacobus Flournoy to John Dick and Frederick Douglass, December 1848
JOHN JACOBUS FLOURNOY TO JOHN DICK AND FREDERICK DOUGLASS
Athens, Ga.1The placeline of the letter also includes “Farm Nigh Athens.” December 1848.
J. DICK AND FRED. DOUGLASS:—
I like not to misdignify myself by writing to negroes, that I know my natural inferiors, and who may be incorriginy bent on insolence, as if sauciness were the sign of freedom; still, to a well-behaved and humble negro, slave or free, I should regard it no lowering of dignity to correspond with sometimes.—Neither of you, by the paper called the North Star, if you are both black men, appear to meet the character of the colored man to whom I would send a letter. In my first letter,2A letter from Flournoy appeared in the 10 November 1848 issue of the North Star. Flournoy was responding to the widely published “Letter to My Old Master.” Both of those letters appear in this volume. NS, 10 November 1848. I should have said, I have no disposition to lower my dignity by writing to a rebellious, turbulent, reckless negro, who possesses charms only for kindred white or black spirits at the North.
I now resume the correspondence, in order to admonish you of the total irrelevancy to your race of behaving in the manner you do towards the Southern slaveholder and the Northern white man. It is always comprehended among us that the negroes are a peppery, irritable and proud and obdurate people, who, when they have a chance, would be sure to prove always irksome and often intolerable to European society. I have seen them wantonly sneer at their white owners and others in the Southern country. I have evidence they continually insult the white people at the North. It seems to be fated you, or to be impossible for you to act with that becoming propriety which should evince a worthy, and an intelligent and pious people. Hence, many at the North wish you in Liberia,3The American Colonization Society founded Liberia, Africa, in 1822 as a haven for black emigrants from the United States. In 1839 the society attempted to strengthen the power of the colony’s central government by proclaiming it a “Commonwealth.” Other nations, however, did not recognize the legitimacy of the Liberian government, which faced attacks from the British Royal Navy and British merchants in Sierra Leone. As a result, in 1847 the society permitted elections, which excluded the native African population, to establish self-govemment in Liberia. The society also approved a Declaration of Independence and a Constitution, drafted by a white Massachusetts lawyer, for the new nation. A free black from Virginia, Joseph Jenkins Roberts, became the first Liberian president, and his tour of Europe in 1848 helped the nation gain international recognition. African Repository, 52:58–59 (April 1876); Christian Abayomi Cassell, Liberia: History of the First African Republic (New York, 1970), 115–16,
128–39, 156–59; Staudenraus, African Colonization Movement, 154, 241–46; DAB, 16:10–11. and many more slaveholders at the South wish the slaves colonized away in their patrimonial dominions. All these is the result more of your character and conduct, than of color only.
For evidence that you act improperly and unintelligently, let me call your attention to two instances. (I write you again to make these corrections.) In publishing my first letter to Douglass, you said you “would not insult the common sense of your readers, by attempting to answer it;” and that it “shot wide of the mark,”4“Shot wide of the mark” is an archery term referring to a shot that landed the arrow far from the intended target. The expression is also used to mean that a person has made a wrong assumption. Stevenson, Book of Proverbs, 2099. and was not argumentary.5In responding to Flournoy’s earlier letter, John Dick wrote, “The arguments—or rather the statements advanced (for the letter is wonderfully far from containing any argument,) are simply ridiculous. It would be an insult to the common sense of the reader to pretend to answer them.” NS, 10 November 1848. How did you know it was not full of arguments? Could your obtuse faculties and dim perceptions never grasp hold of what is obvious to all white men of mind, that you (even if attempting the work) could not controvert my points? Ah, Frederick, you have not yet been put where powerful arguments were unyieldingly in contention; you have not had yet, in any master mind, an
opponent who would contest with you every inch of ground, and leave you finally subdued. You have only been on a gala in England,6On 16 August 1845, following the publication of his Narrative, Douglass left the United States on a two-year speaking tour of Great Britain. In April 1847 he returned to the United States after friends in Britain purchased his freedom. where silly abolitionists were but too ready to give unto all your Sinbad (Arabian Nights)7Sinbad the Sailor was the hero of the Arabian Nights, a series of anonymous tales written in Arabic. He was a Baghdad merchant whose Seven Seas voyages taught the moral lesson that wealth could be obtained only through enterprise and hard work. Henrietta Gerwig, ed, Crowell ’s Handbook for Readers and Writers (New York, 1925), 619–20. marvellous tales of horrors in this Southern prison-house; and are in Rochester among dear friends who are more intent, white as their skins are, to use you, if possible, to mortify the slaveholder, than to do you any good propria persona.8In Latin, one’s own person. Meantime, you and your ebon crew form the most violent and pernicious part of the emancipatists.
In that letter, did you see no argument in my representing the inferiority and superiority of the two races respectively, and the necessity of the relation now existing between them? Did you, whilst Dick sneered at the “decrees,” called me a “Calvinist,”9The central tenet of theologian John Calvin was the concept of predestination. Calvin held that election, or the notion that God had predestined some for salvation, was the very foundation of church membership. The elect should strive to demonstrate and realize their salvation and the righteousness of God through daily conduct. Harro Hopkl, The Christian Polity of John Calvin (London, 1982), 73–75; David N. Wiley, “The Church as the Elect in the Theology of Calvin,” in John Calvin and the Church: A Prism of Reform, ed. Timothy George (Louisville, Ky., 1990), 96–97. and disparage “pious souls,” not be aware that he was then deriding “holy writ,” and blaspheming the spirit,10In the 10 November 1848 issue of the North Star, John Dick introduced Flournoy’s first letter as another “long letter from a Southerner, purporting to be a reply to the letter to Thomas Auld, published some weeks since.” Dick wrote that he published it because it “served to show what are the kind of ideas that perambulate the brain of the slaveholder.” In the same issue, the North Star reprinted a column from the New York Herald attacking another recent issue of the newspaper. Dick noted that the two letters fitted together well because they demonstrated the prejudiced beliefs of both northerners and southerners. As Flournoy suggests, Dick remarked, “Of the two, perhaps the Southerner would make the better Calvinist. His holy faith in decrees must be truly gratifying to pious souls! A better state of mind would be a blessing to both of these writers. Their present tortures must be little short of unendurable. They have our pity.” NS, 10 November 1848. as your father Ham did when he rebelled against Noah,11“The curse of Ham” was a theological justification for slavery that rested upon the story told in Gen. 9:25–27. for dooming him, and drove that ancestor upon the steppes of Asia? Did I not tell you that you would accredit nothing the Bible and white may say, in the favor of the blessed part of the human family?—a blessing you can no more depreciate, disparage, controvert, or sap, or mine, than you can take the mastery of the white man. No; in any struggle, your race would succumb—have ever done so—suppliant in all regions of the world except Haiti, where sixteen negro slaves stood against one white man, with the aid of the British.12The Haitian Revolution (1789–1804), which began as a revolt of the enslaved against their colonial French masters, evolved into a full-fledged civil war among island residents and eventually led to the creation of the first black-controlled independent republic in the Western Hemisphere. Concerned about instability near their own important colonies in the Caribbean, the British became involved in Haitian affairs in 1793 and remained in partial occupation until 1798. Entering the fight following an agreement with several large planters in the French West Indies, the British invaded Saint Domingue in September 1793. The Spanish had similar designs on the islands and fought in alliance with some blacks desiring independence. In May 1794 the black Haitian leader Toussaint L’Ouverture made a major change in allegiance, allying with the French in exchange for a promise of abolition. To attract blacks as fighters, the British also offered them freedom, thereby helping to make the abolition of slavery an important goal of the revolution and enabling the formation of the black republic. Carolyn E. Pick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingae Revolution from Below (Knoxville, Tenn., 1990), 201–03, 246–47; Ott, Haitian Revolution, 76–84. But pitch any five white men against any ten or fifteen negroes, and give fair play, and as usual the latter will serve the former. Can the “Decrees” of God, then, be sneered at, and I, only a Calvinist, for asserting them? Does not the Omnipotent know why and wherefore He did so constitute the human family? And if He “made of one blood all the nations that dwell on the earth,” has He not “appointed the bounds of their habitations”?13Acts 17:26. Is not African slavery, therefore, a violation of the terms of that appointment? Yes, it is so. The negro cannot find himself in his own habitation or element, till he is upon the soil of Africa, and then if his own color does not enslave him, he is free indeed. We cannot go there and enslave your people and live. God has separated the colors as clearly as any fact in nature can be proved by philosophy and observation.
The other instance is, your attempt to underestimate Mr. Webster at Lynn, Massachusetts.14Sometime between 27 October and the November election of 1848, Douglass heard Daniel Webster campaigning in Lynn, Massachusetts, on behalf of the slaveholding presidential candidate Zachary Taylor. Although he could not recall Webster’s words, Douglass remembered that Webster had “trifled with his moral sense, and destroyed his conscience.” NS, 24 November 1848. It is equally an error as your attempt not to see the arguments of my first letter. Mr. Webster has always been the friend of your race, and never was in favor of slavery; but he cannot, like Garrison, endeavor to destroy the Constitution of his country,15William Lloyd Garrison believed that the U.S. Constitution was inherently a proslavery document and, therefore, could not be used to defeat slavery. He referred to the Constitution as “the devil’s pact” because it provided for the return of fugitive slaves, and because of its role in the repeated sectional compromises that perpetuated slavery in the Union. Garrison’s attacks on the Constitution began as simple denunciation, but quickly moved toward political and philosophical critique. Garrison and his followers eventually rejected political means toward abolition, just as they disallowed the role of religion in the movement. Mayer, All on Fire, 310–14. in any effort to liberate the Africans; for aside from the bad taste and impropriety of thus
violating his official oath, to serve the Constitution next to his God, the inexpediency of such a course is the more glaring. Any violent effort to free the slaves in this land, would be a civil war, and perhaps rivet their chains the more strongly. You and Garrison may not care about this, and would attempt to do it, and risk all in one prodigious ruin! Where, then, is YOUR fixed principle? Mr. Webster’s fixed moral, and political, and religious principle, disallow his venturing on so foolhardy and insane an experiment.—He therefore, though he does not like a slaveholder, argued and voted for Taylor,16Late in the 1848 presidential campaign, Webster reluctantly gave his support to the Whig candidate, Zachary Taylor. Webster was not among the antislavery Whigs who walked out of the convention following Taylor’s nomination, but he was clearly ambivalent about his party’s selection of a slaveholding candidate. Webster was silent publicly on the subject until 1 September 1848, when he told supporters at a Whig rally in Marshfield, Massachusetts, that he believed Taylor’s nomination was a mistake. He added, however, that Taylor had far more to offer than the Democratic nominee, Lewis Cass, or the Free Soil candidate, former president Martin Van Buren. To prevent a victory for either, Webster cast his vote for Taylor. Irving Bartlett, Daniel Webster (New York, 1978), 237–39; Robert F. Dalzell, Jr., Daniel Webster and the Trial of American Nationalism, 1843–1852 (Boston, 1973), 148–52. in preference to Cass,17Lewis Cass. and Van Buren,18Martin Van Buren (1782–1862), eighth president of the United States, began his career as a lawyer in New York. Van Buren represented Columbia County in the New York Senate in 1812, where he developed a political rivalry with DeWitt Clinton. In 1815 he was appointed state attorney general, but Clinton supporters removed him in 1819 because he opposed funding the Erie Canal. Van Buren challenged his rivals by building a Democratic-Republican organization known as the Bucktails. During Clinton’s second term as governor, the Bucktails gained control of the state legislature and appointed Van Buren to the U.S. Senate in 1821. Van Buren’s rise to power earned him the nickname “Little Magician” among his admirers. With his own designs on national politics, Van Buren campaigned on behalf of Andrew Jackson in 1828. Elected governor of New York that same year, Van Buren resigned when Jackson appointed him U.S. attorney general in 1829. In his new cabinet post, Van Buren developed an intense rivalry with Vice President John C. Calhoun. In 1832 Van Buren became Jackson’s running mate for vice president as a reward for his loyalty and political skill. Van Buren then gained the president’s support to succeed him in the Oval Office in 1836. Although Van Buren tried to continue Jackson’s policies, he lost popularity following the Panic of 1837, when his enemies dubbed him Martin “Van Ruin” and blamed him for the country’s economic woes. Failing to be reelected, Van Buren retired to New York in 1841. In 1848 his opposition to the extension of slavery in the territories gained in the Mexican-American War returned him to politics as the Free Soil candidate for president, but he received a mere 10 percent of the vote. In the 1850s, once more a Democrat, he endorsed the Compromise of 1850 and gave uneasy support to the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. He died in 1862, dismayed at the dissolution of the Union. Donald B. Cole, Martin Van Buren and the American Political System (Princeton, N.J., 1984), 3–5, 9–31; ANB, 22:159–62. and Gerrit Smith, for reasons of state, and to rescue the country from, in his opinion, the political spoilers.—His reasons, therefore, are obvious and principled, though you did not evidently see them.
I would advise you as a friend to go to Liberia, and to urge your free colored brethren to this course. In the long run, stopping in America can do the colored race no good; and the heart-burnings you experience among your white friends would always keep you under excitement. Strive to have a good, mild, amiable heart; a[n]d knowing your place, act as one conscious that God’s (Christ’s) decree is forever for the best, and after awhile, your race’s captivity, “like Job’s,”19In the book of Job, Job experienced great suffering, but his fortunes reversed after he proved his faithfulness to God. Freedman, Anchor Bible Dictionary, 3:858–67. be turned, and they may form again, as of old, a Republic, and a better one, in Africa.
J. J. FLOURNOY
PLSr: NS, 5 January 1849. Reprinted in NASS, 18 January 1849; Lib., 19 January 1849.