William Whipper to Frederick Douglass, November 11, 1849
Columbia, [Pa.] 11 Nov[ember] 1849.
FRIEND DOUGLASS:
The object of a “National League,” or a union of the oppressed for the sake of freedom, “is a subject of such magnitude” and importance, that those who may not regard it as being attainable under the present civil and religious organizations of this country, are inexcusable for remaining silent.
You have well and truly said, “let no one hesitate to speak because he thinks he sees insurmountable difficulties in the way of the movement. We want discussion—we want action.”1Whipper quotes Douglass’s editorial “The National League,” which appeared in the 26 October 1849 issue of the North Star. The expediency of an organized union among our people has long engaged my attention, and I do most freely confess that it appears to me to be a subject that is fraught with difficulties and dangers, as well as promises and blessings. I have neither the time nor the necessary qualifications to engage in public discussion, and have been anxiously waiting to see some able polemic pen engaged in the fruitful theme. My present object in writing is to afford you an opportunity of more fully explaining the principles and measures necessary to its accomplishment.
I believe that the motto, “Union of the oppressed for the sake of freedom,”2This motto appeared as the title of the North Star editorial in which Douglass first proposed the formation of a “National League” for “the abolition of slavery, and the elevation and improvement of the free colored people of the United States.” NS, 10 October 1849. will be interpreted by the pro-slavery press, to mean an union of the black against the white man, and the overthrow of American Institutions. For however strange and unnatural it may appear, it is nevertheless true, that the success of any movement among ourselves is more dependent on the praise of our enemies, than the labors of our friends. For of late our denunciations have been as unerringly directed against abolitionists as slave-holders. When you shall have launched the “League” in the pro-slavery current of this nation, you will be obliged to answer the nautical questions, viz: “From whence do you hail? What is your object? and to what port are you destined?” or receive a broadside.
You well know that we have no security in the divine nature of our object, for that being interpreted in the popular tongue, means “devil incarnate,” and vestal purity of motive—“a rapacious desire to corrupt all that is “good and holy” in the affections of the multitude. So deeply seated are the religious and political prejudices against which we have to contend, that virtue and vice change their character to suit the complexion of the actor. During the recent eventful period of nations, the press has been teeming with the fate of “Leagues” for civil and religious reform, and the proclamation has gone forth that God is on the side of the strong.
It will be useless to say that this is not a complexional question, for its success would depend on so stating it,—and the collision springing from
its action against public sentiment, would be more likely to increase and concentrate existing prejudices, than scatter and disseminate them. It is,
therefore, no less a dictate of interest than humanity, to avoid a “complexional issue.”
I therefore assume, that while we have no national existence “as a people,” we can have no national institutions; and if this position be true, the “League,” in a national point of view, falls to the ground. 2dly. That the history of nations shows that a distinct civil and religious code has been the only successful rallying point calculated to unite any people—and as the colored people of this county are for the most part disfranchised, and without any distinct religious faith from that of their oppressors, they are without the elementary principle calculated to cement them in the bonds of confederation. 3dly. We have the example of history that the religious institutions of both ancient and modern nations were made subservient to the civil power, and so regulated as to aid in securing and transmitting temporal, as well as spiritual blessings among the people. Now, the colored people of this country are almost destitute of civil and political power, and are also without a distinctive religious faith calculated to promote their temporal interests, but have (what in my humble opinion is worse for them than no religion at all) copied and adopted the pro-slavery tenets of American Protestantism as they exist in the Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, and Baptist denominations, whose consolidated point of union is a belief in the existence of God, and the natural inferiority of the colored people.3William Whipper repeated the common charges of most immediate abolitionists, regardless of faction, against the major American denominations. Abolitionists condemned slaveholding as intrinsically sinful and demanded that the churches deny their fellowship to such individuals. When churches rejected or equivocated on taking such a strict position, the abolitionists accused them of sanctioning slavery. At the same time, most white congregations demonstrated their racial prejudices through such practices as segregated seating or communions. John R. McKivigan, “The Northern Churches and the Moral Problem of Slavery,” in The Meaning of Slavery in the North, ed. David Roediger and Morton H. Blatt (New York, 1998), 77-94; Miller and Smith, Dictionary of Afro-American Slavery, 77-80, 223-25, 462-66, 586-90. It cannot, therefore, be expected that people who have sincerely and honestly (though unfortunately,) adopted those creeds and theories which have (for a series of years) been enforced by interpolations of scripture, hewn out by cunning and scientific theologians, for the purpose of perpetuating the infernal dogma of our inferiority, can have a just respect
for themselves, or feel within them those vivid pulsations, whose soul-inspiring throbs animate the bosom of manhood. No, it cannot be—every law of the human mind rejects such an affirmation.
Man is naturally a religious being. His religious nature constitutes his highest element. If he stoops from his naturally erect position before his God and his fellow man, and copies the religious theory of his aggressor, he then feels religiously happy in whatever makes his oppressor happy. While the former thanks his God that he was born to rule, the latter thanks God that he was born to serve.
The religion of those Protestant sects is so antipodal to the freedom and prosperity of our people, that no white man can successfully advocate our equal claims to citizenship without first losing case in the church, and there repudiating his religion altogether. In my humble opinion, if our peole every become united in the prosecution of objects for the promotion of their common welfare, it will be when they have erected the altar of a new religion over the grave of Sectarianism.
WM. WHIPPER.