John Jacobus Flournoy to Frederick Douglass, February 19, 1849
JOHN JACOBUS FLOURNOY TO FREDERICK DOUGLASS
Athens, Ga.1The placeline of the letter also includes “Farm near Athens.” 19 Feb[ruary] 1849.
MR. EDITOR:—
I find it useless to write to men who do not heed, or cannot comprehend the ideas I may convey, and who, judging from the matter of the editorial of the samples of your paper sent me, attempt more the rhetoric of words, than the imparting of solid knowledge. In all the mass of verbiage which you write for that press, how little of ideas are conveyed, and of these ideas, how little accurate! Do you really understand yourselves as white folks see
your reasoning? I have taken a glance over some few of your editorials, and although I observe the exhibition of some talents, the bulk of their purports falls far below the condensed or even diffuse argumentation of able white editors. I know not that you have any white assistant to correct and dress up your effusions, but they are not such as men properly pretending to, or conscious of equal parts and capacities with any other people on the globe, would write. Take one example, elaborate with “F. D.”—his reasoning to his own people, January 19th last.2In the 19 January 1849 issue of the North Star, Douglass published his own editorial, “A Few Words to Our Own People,” in which he criticized the provision of the Omnibus Bill, later revised as the Compromise of 1850. He specifically focused on the provision that would allow the residents of southwestern territories to vote upon the permission of slavery in those areas, mistrusting not only that proposition, but also northern politicians who advocated that the area become a reserve for African Americans. “This we take to be another cunning scheme of our oppressors,” Douglass wrote. “Once get the free colored man confined in any one territory or locality—let us once be separated from the white people of this country, and we shall become the mere game of American trappers and other adventurers. . . . It is certain that there can be no good accomplished by emigration, unless we go beyond the musket shot of white American adventurers.” He said that the colored people CANNOT find a State by themselves in New Mexico, or anywhere not beyond “gun-shot” of the Anglo-Saxon race. This is the cream of that piece of tedious loquacities. Now what has this model negro of Abolition idealized, that can be observable as to his race? I put it to Gerrit Smith, to Lewis Tappan,3Lewis Tappan (1788–1873), an affluent New York merchant and abolitionist, devoted much of his considerable wealth and energy to religious and reform causes such as abolitionism. Tappan was an early supporter of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions and the American Bible Society, a founder of the New York Evangelist, and a patron of Oberlin College. Tappan helped organize the New York Anti-Slavery Society and the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. In 1840 he broke with William Lloyd Garrison over the issue of political action and the advisability of linking abolitionism to other reforms. He was a founder and leading figure in the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society and maintained close ties with British abolitionists opposed to Garrison. Tappan played a leading part in securing the freedom of the African captives on the slave ship Amistad in 1841. In 1846 Tappan abandoned efforts to convert older benevolent societies to abolitionism and founded the American Missionary Association. Focused mainly on the religious sphere, Tappan gave only a lukewarm endorsement to political abolitionism. Wyatt-Brown, Lewis Tappan; DAB, 18:303–04. and to W. L. Garrison on your side, and to any three gentlemen on the side of fairness, of truth, to decide whether or not you implied the inferiority of your race, and the propriety of going off to Liberia—that land beyond American “gun-shot.”—You do me injustice in trying to exhibit me to ridicule. You ridicule your own mental and moral powers, by estimating yourselves unable to live near, but separate from the Anglo-Saxon—as if one race could control the destiny of the other, however guarded yours be by a State constitution! And in effect, you, in that 19th January article, undid the allegation you made a few weeks previously, that you had better moral and mental qualities than my second letter to you evinced to be mine.4Flournoy wrote his second letter to Douglass and John Dick in December 1848, and it appeared in the 5 January 1849 issue of the North Star. That letter also appears in this volume along with Flournoy’s first letter of 10 November 1848. Your inferiority and dependence on the race of your old masters, are confessed by yourselves.
In few and short remarks you made relating to myself,5In the same issue of the North Star in which Flournoy’s second letter appeared, Douglass published his own commentary on the letter. After referring to Flournoy as a “Calvinistic kidnapper and evangelical woman-flogger,” he wrote that Floumoy “is evidently desirous of notoriety, and will obtain it at any cost. Were he in England, he would probably shoot at the Queen, or perform some like exploit, for no other reason than the love of notoriety.” NS, 5 January 1849. you do not respect that God to whom I referred as to certain decrees, and attempt to cast odium on me as a seeker after “notoriety.” If I want negro notoriousness in writing to you, and had no ulterior view, no ameliorating designs, no desire to rescue my Republic from dissolution in its unity; if, in short, my object, equal to “assassinating a Queen,” was like the aspiration of Erastratus,6In 356 B.C.E., allegedly on the night of the birth of Alexander the Great, Erastratus, or Herostratus, burned the Temple of Diana in Ephesus for the sole purpose of ensuring his own everlasting fame. The leader of Ephesus not only executed him for this arson, but also forbade his name to be spoken, a move that succeeded only in increasing his notoriety. Harry Thurston Peck, ed., Harper’s Dictionary of Classical Literature and Antiquities (New York, 1923), 599, 808. why did I not get a shorter road to this fame, by immolating myself in Georgia, and sanctifying my name at the North, among your friends, by sending you a letter most abusive on the South? Why do I face the thunder of the South, by warning its interests to colonize your dangerous tribe off in their patrimonial country, and incur the hatred and scurrility of the Emancipatists in England and America, by telling you, in plain, unsophisticated English, what you are? Of course, like every man who tries to better the world, I too must have some ambition. All men but the merest drone or expletive, have aspiration. The only difference is that which exists be[t]ween
mere seekers of fame for its sake, like Bonaparte,7Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) was emperor of France from 1804 to 1815. or those that look to conservative deeds for gratitude of mankind, which confers a true and honest immortality. If I can (no matter what or whom I be) manage to induce my countrymen to peremptorily plant the Africans elsewhere out of this Republic, and by so doing preserve not only our political Union, but an affection between the various sections thereof, ultimately benefitting both races, my motive would be better seen, and my “notoriety” transcending all your conceptions of it! If I were in England, so far from noticing the Queen, who is the helpless creature of the British Constitution, were I inclined to do Britains a favor. I would point to the necessity of amending her Magna Charta8In 1215 a group of English barons forced King John to sign the Magna Carta, which set a precedent for limiting the powers of the monarch by granting the English aristocracy various rights. James Clarke Holt, Magna Carta (Cambridge, Eng, 1992). to greater liberality. I care not for persons; principles and systems are what the wise aim to establish—the matter of individuals being arranged by nations whenever circumstance and prophecy warrant a division.
I do not care for a controversy, when I have evidence that no fair argumentation can exist with those who descend only to ridicule and to sneer. It is enough that the North saw my letters—the thinking white people there, who have the capacity to appreciate my remarks, and the candor to conscientiously admit the impregnability of my position, as well the propriety and humanity of my advice to you. You flitted over them like the butterfly over the flowery hills, but the truth is not the less durable.
I saw that my observation that I had prayed to God to agony for the colonization of the negro race in Africa, drew from “J. D.” a jest at its being “scarcely endurable.”9John Dick, in commenting on Flournoy’s first letter, stated that a better state of mind would be a blessing to Flournoy, and that his “present tortures must be little short of unendurable.” NS, 10 November 1848.
I saw my remarks in the second epistle bringing from “F. D.” the church-attacking epithets of “Calvinistic kidnapper,” and “evangelical woman-flogger.”
What now shall be inferred from such lame attempts at disparagement, eschewing all argument as these? My natural view was directed to that propensity of your race everywhere, to using mockery or mirth at anybody or thing; and to the easy graduation by which negroes fall from a laughing habit to a vituperative temper. And, in review, passing before me was Ham, mocking the patriarch Noah, in his state of nudity,10Gen. 9:25–27. and then quickly, that unfi[l]ial and undevout, haughty character, which he exhibited when, as all antiquarians proved, he was angry at that ancestor, and blasphemous against the Deity; and making himself as Jupiter Ammon,11The Egyptian god Amon, or Ammon, was often identified with the Roman god Jupiter, both of whom were considered the leaders of their respective pantheons. Freedman, Anchor Bible Dictionary, 1:197–98. their God, he instituted pagan worship, and his grandson Nimrod,12Nimrod, who was the son of Cush and the grandson of Noah, became a military hero and the king of Babylon. In Christian tradition he is considered a sinner for having promoted the Tower of Babel. Freedman, Anchor Bible Dictionary, 4:1116–17. kingcraft—things that yet scourge the nations, and which made Noah’s curse the more irrevocable on Ham!—In keeping with this sacrilegious character, you, with a
few such rabid and incoherent traitors to truth and to their country as Gerrit Smith, and open infidels and destructives as W. L. Garrison, compare the American character to “fiends” and “devils,” because they do not join you in hating and abusing all that hold slaves in this part of the Union, and the only ipse dixit13A statement that has authority based only upon the assertion of the speaker. of your fraternity by which a Christian must find his standard, is neither in piety, nor peace, nor the Bible, but in bowing down and idolizing the Egyptian blackness of your infernal complexion, or in defiling God’s sane theory with the abominations of your erring judgments! I knew how white Israelites strove to turn back to Egypt, not only on the way, but long after Joshua’s time,14As the successor of Moses, Joshua led the Israelites into the land of Canaan, where they renewed their covenant with God, thus fulfilling Moses' mission. Freedman, Anchor Bible Dictionary, 3:999. and so fascinating was the Egyptian face to them, that God, by one of the prophets, admonished them thus: “Now the Egyptians are men, and not Gods.”15Isa. 31:3. How seducing must the negro’s charms be over many white persons, to induce from on high such an explanation! I see it at the North, where not only men fall into the irrelevant snare, and think ever after like nonsensical people, but our white women in many places look with some horror at the idea of not playing the Desdemona, and making Othellos16In William Shakespeare’s play Othello, Desdemona had eloped with the African general Othello. Although the union seemed happy, the scheming Iago convinces Othello that Desdemona has committed adultery, and Othello strangles her in a jealous rage. After realizing that he has been deceived, Othello commits suicide. Frank N. Magill, Masterplots: 510 Plots in Story Form from the World’s Finest Literature, 2 vols. (New York, 1955), 2:701–03. of your gang, and contemplate the refusal to wed with a negro as a sin! And I am fully conscious that among your reasons for wishing to stay forever in the centre of white communities here is none more extr[a]ordinary and all-absorbing than the secret or open hope or wish to get white wives! In fact, your own daily habit of talking, writing and acting, prove your deep disdain for yourselves. * * * *
But I warn the insane North that this would never do. The fruits of indiscriminate amalgamation have been seen in the population of Arabia, of Maurit[a]nia, of Spain, of Italy, of Ireland, and are now visible in South America and Mexico. If it ever improved on the African constitution, it does not on the European. We white men and women are perfect enough without your amalgam. Your mixture spoils that original perfectness. The Arabs are a people with hand mutually against each other. Why? Turn to that book you fearfully make light of and see. Ishmael was a half-Egyptian17Ishmael was the son of Abraham by Hagar, handmaiden to Sarah, Abraham’s wife. When Sarah proved unable to bear children for her husband, she presented him with Hagar. When Hagar gave birth to a son, however, Sarah shunned her. Hagar fled to the desert, where an angel found her and prophesied that her son would “be a wild man; his hand will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him; and he shall dwell in the presence of all his brethren.” He was considered the less favored of Abraham’s sons because God chose to make a covenant with Ishmael’s brother, Isaac, and his descendants. Gen. 16:1–16, 17:19; Freedman, Anchor Bible Dictionary, 3:512.—a mulatto. The prophecy fulfilled in his family is certain to this hour. But why was it given? Why was not Isaac18Isaac was Abraham’s son by his wife, Sarah. God established a covenant with Isaac and his descendants, particularly his son Jacob, who became the father of the tribes of Israel. Gen. 17:19; Freedman, Anchor Bible Dictionary, 3:462–70. also thus historically foretold? The Moors that held Spain for six centuries,19Between 711 and 720 C.E., invaders from Morocco moved across the Strait of Gibraltar and established control over the southern part of the Iberian Peninsula and its Visigoth inhabitants. The Moroccans gradually expanded their control, religion, and culture northward for the next three hundred years, but never fully occupied the entire peninsula. From the eleventh until the fifteenth centuries, the Christian kingdoms from the northern coast and the Pyrenees Mountains struggled with the Muslims, advancing and retreating until all but the kingdom of Grenada fell under Christian control. In 1492, with financial support from the Vatican’s funds for crusades, the monarchs Fernando, or Ferdinand, of Aragon and Isabella of Castile seized control of Grenada. Rather than pursue territorial expansion into Morocco, Fernando and Isabella turned their efforts to eliminating all Muslims and Jews from Spain and to exploring the Western Hemisphere. E. Michael Gerli, ed., Medieval Iberia: An Encyclopedia (New York, 2003), 2–3, 13–14, 697–700. contaminated the Gothic majesty and blood into that mongrel race of Spaniards, that yet not only acts turbulently at home, but still in Brazil and other places keeps up the slavetrade across the ocean.20Despite the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade by Britain and the United States in the early nineteenth century, Portuguese and Spanish colonies continued to import captured Africans until the 1860s. Brazil, which had historically dominated the transatlantic slave trade, ended importation under pressure from the British Navy in 1850. Cuba continued to engage in the transatlantic slave trade until 1867. Other colonies and countries attempted to circumvent their own prohibitions against this trade by purchasing Africans from traders in ports in Brazil and Cuba. Herbert S. Klein, African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean (New York, 1986), 150–51; Johannes Postma, The Atlantic Slave Trade (Westport, Conn., 2003), xxi–xxii, 72–73; David Eltis, “The Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Slave Trade: An Annual Time Series of Imports into the Americas Broken Down by Region,” Hispanic American Historical Review, 67:109–38 (February 1987). The Portuguese are of the same family. Look too at Ireland. Her own historians would have it, that a colony of trading Phoenicians (Canaanites!)21Phoenicia was a group of allied cities north of Palestine that dominated the eastern Mediterranean trade. Much of Palestine fell into the territory that was commonly known as Canaan, and Flournoy seems to be conflating the two groups. Flournoy also seems to refer to one of the legends of the “Black Irish” who, according to a predominantly American tradition, were supposedly descendants of different bands of traders from the Mediterranean, including Spanish Moors, Romans, and Phoenicians. Freedman, Anchor Bible Dictionary, 1:828–30, 5:349–57. settled in their Island, and incorporated with the natives. The fact now is, that in Ireland there are many dark-
skinned, black-haired and dark-eyed men, who are of Canaanite origin; and the further fact is, that the Irish here have the habit of falling into negro-errors, called bulls,22An “Irish bull” was a type of ethnic joke in which the participants, usually two or more Irish men, misunderstand an idea or situation with absurd results. These types of jokes, which gained popularity in the American vaudeville theater, often relied upon puns or double meanings while also suggesting the lack of intelligence of the subjects. Flournoy is also expressing the common prejudice against the Irish that many native-born Americans exhibited as the number of emigrants from that nation increased during the potato famines of the 1840s and 1850s. Since most of the arriving immigrants came impoverished to the United States, and many of the northern free blacks lived in depressed areas of cities, the two groups often found themselves in close company. They competed for the same jobs with one another and with poor native-born white Americans, found themselves populating city jails together, and sometimes engaged in interracial sexual or romantic relationships. Racial slurs portrayed African Americans and Irish immigrants unfavorably and were used by one group to slander the other. Both groups grew to detest one another and to adopt the dominant stereotyped view of the other. Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York, 1995), 40–42; Dale T. Knobel, Paddy and the Republic: Ethnicity and Nationality in Antebellum America (Middletown, Conn., 1986), 93, 179; David Ross, The Male of a Cow: An Anthology of Traditional Irish Humour (Belfast, Ire., 2000), 19; Carl Wittke, The Irish in America (Baton Rouge, La., 1956), 192, 195. and are of course many of them a quarrelsome, peppery, ferocious and reckless people and as their ancestor was apparently doomed to inferiority or slavery, so they are measurably easily enslaved by the race of the Angl-Saxons. So you see the consequence of amalgamation is not creditable to us. In Ireland, Phoenician men married Gothic women, and their progeny had a different appearance from the mulattoes of the South, who are the breed of white men and black or colored women. This is the cause that the Irish do not resemble our mulattoes. But the philosophy of the fact is defined.
If you negroes have any high sense, really, of your abilities or qualities, why do you shrink so sensitively from finding a local habitation of your own? If my reason be the true one, I must repulse the affiliation, for we should qualify ourselves to the established laws of Jehovah, before whom I bid you to fall down and humble yourselves, and to seek the grace of Christ to enable you to perceive the true path of duty.
One observation more. A paper from Boston, the Christian Register,23In 1821 the American Unitarian Association began publishing the weekly Christian Register on School Street in Boston. In 1849 David Reed was publisher and Nathaniel S. Folsom was editor. Boston Christian Register, 20 January 1849; Merrill and Ruchames, Garrison Letters, 2:416n. was, by some unknown hand, sent me, pen marked, to indicate the Ethnology24An article titled “REV. DR. COX ON ETHNOLOGY” was a reprint of a report that originally appeared in the Boston Independent on an antislavery speech given by Samuel Cox at “a meeting of congratulation for the redemption of the daughters of Mr. Edmonson from slavery.” In his speech, Cox refuted the argument supporting slavery that was based upon the genealogy of Noah and Ham. Cox argued against the common belief that Canaan was the ancestor of Africans. He argued, “From Japheth are we whites descended . . . ; the Asiatics generally from Shem; the Africans generally from Ham.” Of Ham’s sons, Misraim was the ancestor of Egyptians, Phut was the ancestor of the Muslims, and Cush was the ancestor of “the present negro world.” Their descendants, according to this analysis, migrated westward from the Arabian Peninsula to eastern Africa, eventually settling the entire continent. Ham’s fourth son, Canaan, on whom Noah fixed his curse of servitude, remained in the Middle East. Therefore, Cox insisted that the curse “was Asiatic, and in no sense African. Hence we can relieve the consciences, as well as instruct the creeds of our pious slave merchants on the Gold coast.” In general, ethnology, a subfield of anthropology, is the comparative study of cultures. The term was first used by James Cowles Prichard, a British anthropologist and abolitionist, in The Natural History of Man (1842), a book with which Douglass was familiar. Boston Christian Register, 20 January 1849; James Cowles Prichard, The Natural History of Man (London, 1845); Charlotte Seymour-Smith, Dictionary of Anthropology (Boston, 1986), 99–100. (It is of the 20th January.) As I cannot employ my time in writing so many letters to the Abolitionists, I wish, as you may print this epistle, as the third and last from me, to call the attention of the editor of that press, and of Dr. Cox,25Samuel H. Cox. to certain errors into which I conceive him fallen. I was a little surprised to see the Doctor admitting what I thought no man North of Virginia ever admitted. I thought Faber’ s elaborate attempt to discover the origin of pagan idolatry26In The Origin of Pagan Idolatry (1816), one of the more famous treatises by English minister George Stanley Faber (1773–1854), the author attempts to connect all religions to Christianity by using a contemporary interpretation method known as “typology.” Faber argues in a rather elaborate fashion that the gods of non-Christian religions originated after the biblical flood. According to this theory, Faber believed that the sons of Noah served as the basis for non-Christian gods. George Stanley Faber, The Origins of Pagan Idolatry (1816; New York, 1984); DNB, 6:975–76. was orthodox at the North, and that author stated that the Europeans were the progeny of Cush,27Cush was the grandson of Noah, son of Ham, and father of Nimrod. He was commonly considered the ancestor of the Ethiopians and Babylonian Kassites. Freedman, Anchor Bible Dictionary, 1:1219. and the Ethiopians of Japhet!28Japhet was a region north of the Syrian Desert. A character named Japhet was the traditional ancestor of the Phoenicians. Freedman, Anchor Bible Dictionary, 3:642, 5:349. Dr. Cox, however, reversed the belief, and I find at least one man who thinks the truth there. The Abolitionists have ever acted as if there was no division of races by Noah’s three sons. Now one man corroborates not only my sentiment, but the researchers of that greatest of Archeologists, Bryant.29Jacob Bryant (1715–1804), an English antiquary, was most famous for his four-volume study of ancient religions, A New System, or an Analysis of Ancient Mythology (1774; revised and expanded to 6 volumes, 1807). He refuted the existence of Troy before the discovery of its ruins by Heinrich Schliemann in 1871 and wrote against the ideologies of the late eighteenth-century radical Thomas Paine. DNB, 3:155–57.
Nevertheless, Dr. Cox falls into an error as to the extent of the curse on Ham, i.e. Canaan, and as to the meaning of the word Ethiopian.30Cox wrote, “Wherever Ethiopia is mentioned in our Bible, the original is Cush. Ethiopia means, in good Greek, brown or burnt face.” Boston Christian Register, 20 January 1849.
Now I hold that this curse was not confined to and fulfilled in Canaan only. The Canaanites were not enslaved; a very small portion of them were, and that from a strat[a] gem they acted.—They were killed or expulsed. The idea of servitude attaching not to that branch of Ham’s race, I inquire, to whom did it attach? I answer, to ALL. Our version of the Bible said Ham
was himself the mocker; and the curse on Canaan was, in Moses’ opinion, to have that drift, as they were the tribe with whom the Jews dealt most. Still, Ham's name might have been Canaan, for he may have had more than one appendage as we observe by Jupiter Ammon. The old Arabic version of Genesis says, “Cursed be Ham, the father of Canaan.” And the book of Iasher31The book of Iasher, or Jasher, was a legendary collection of Israelite poetry, mentioned throughout the Old Testament but never recovered. The book to which Flournoy refers was a forgery that appeared in 1829 that was said to have been discovered originally in the ninth century by the archbishop of Canterbury on a pilgrimage to the Middle East and rediscovered in the eighteenth century. Freedman, Anchor Bible Dictionary, 3:646–47. (lately found) has the same allusion. Notwithstanding all this matter of slavery, I think the curse was to separation or to inferiority, if united. “A servant of servants,” implied a very low degradation—a servant to our horses and dogs—lower than Southern slavery; in fact, it meant nothing but separation, or at least inferiority!
The meaning of Ethiopian, Dr. Cox would find by consulting Bryant, is “serpent worshipper, from Ethi, to worship, and Opi, a serpent.”32Some scholars have interpreted Bryant’s writings on ancient religions as saying that Ethiopians derived their name from Ath-Ope, and Ath-Opis, meaning the worship of the serpent. William Holwell, A Mythological, Etymological, and Historical Dictionary; Extracted from the Analysis of Ancient Mythology (London, 1793), 190. This is the right Greek definition. It would seem that when Ham made his unfortunate progeny idolators, they worshipped the figure and living symbol of Satan, as the principle of dread, and cried “Eva,” “Eva,” in reference to Eve, a rite in Egypt.33Flournoy seems to be confusing several aspects of Central and West African culture and its transference to the Americas. Snakes figure in many African religions as powerful symbols, particularly in the epics of the Nkundo, Luba, and Bantu of Central Africa. Statues, though usually human in form, are also important to African religions, especially as centerpieces in altars. Eve is a specifically Judeo-Christian figure. She became the mother of mankind after being tempted to disobey God by a serpent in Paradise. Her name in Aramaic, Hawwâ, is also a pun on the Aramaic word for snake, hwh. Thomas D. Blakely, Walter E. A. Van Beek, and Dennis L. Thomson, eds., Religion in Africa: Experience and Expression (Portsmouth, N.H., 1994), 101–02, 136, 184, 192, 231–36; Freedman, Anchor Bible Dictionary, 2:676–77. This custom still continues in some places in Africa, adjoining Liberia. Hence, the blacks became thus denoted.
Colored People! I wish you well! God only can turn your captivity from Satan, to that blessed light of true liberty, not only here, but in Africa!
J. J. FLOURNOY.
PLeSr: NS, 9 March 1849.