Ethiope, Jr., to Frederick Douglass, January 29, 1852
Comparison
Between President Bonapart and his Adherents, and President Fillmore and his Adherents.
Frederick Douglass:—How humiliating to republicans! how disgusting to every lover of rational liberty, is the perfidy of the present Rulers of France, and the United States! Their perfidy is doubly humiliating, and disgusting, by their hypocrisy, and pretended necessity with which they endeavor to exculpate themselves! In this respect, how ever, Bonapart is less guilty than Fillmore.—While the former boldly violates the constitution of the French Republic, the latter professes to act in accordance with ours; but when we recollect his former expressed opinion, and that of his Secretary of State, on the third clause, second section, fourth article of the constitution: that it only applies to the mutual obligations between the States, and confers no authority whatever upon the General Government, honest men are constrained to believe that Fillmore not only added by hypocrisy, but base subserviency to the South, to the crime of violating both the Declaration of Independence, and the constitution of his country! In the plea of necessity which Bonapart and Fillmore both set up as a justification for their tyranny, they are both equally false.
But between their adherents, there is no parallel. Those of Bonapart, are compelled to obey despotic power at the peril of their liberty, if not of their lives; while in the United States, speech, the Press, Legislative, and Judiciary proceedings, are yet comparatively free; the attempts to construct treason, pack Juries, and bribe Judges, to the contrary notwithstanding! Yet we are constrained to confess with shame, that the sordid advantages of trade, and office, or the vain approbation of the wealthy, and aristocratic of the land, induces the majority of our own nation to support piracy, robbery, adultery, and murder of the worst sort!!
Perhaps the noble Kossuth, who is receiving the sympathy of so large a portion of our citizens, may think this an unmerited slander. If so, let him compare the Fugitive Slave Law and the proceedings under it with the Declaration of our Independence and Federal Constitution, and visit Drayton, and Sayres, in their prison at Washington; it will not be necessary for him to visit the indigo, and rice swamps, or cotton plantations, to be completely disabused as to our character.
But after all, there is a noble band of worthies in the United States, and they are daily increasing in number, and they will not always suffer our organic Laws and the Laws of God and nature to be trampled in the dust, under a pretense of carrying out certain unexpressed compromises with slavery by the drafters of our constitution, in secret conclave. It will take more evidence than has been advanced by President Fillmore, or Governor Hunt, and all their conservatives,
to convince the real believers in the foundation principles of our Government, that slavery or piracy can be perpetuated by Law, either by, or without a constitution. Washington, Franklin, Adams, Jefferson and Hancock [...] pleasure no doubt, in resisting laws of King George the III, encroaching on the inalienable rights of man, their oaths of allegiance notwithstanding: and they set forth those encroachments as a full and glorious justification. If tradition, prejudice, or a false expediency, induced them afterwards to suffer slavery to remain, it is a poor argument to prove its legality, or that it should resist the light of the nineteenth century, after it has been declared piracy by the civilized World. All bills of attainder should be trampled under foot by our citizens.
Never did I enjoy a season of more devout obedience and gratitude to God, or disinterested benevolence towards my fellow men, [than] I experienced one dark, rainy night, in an open vehicle, last fall, in conveying two men forty miles to a place of safety, who were driven from their families by kidnappers under the pretense of Law! Law consigning them to slavery on the ground that their great grandmothers (perhaps) was a victim of pirates!! Like Kossuth, neither of them were of pure Anglo-Saxon blood; like him they were obliged to flee their native land, leaving their wives and children behind; like him also they have received the protection of a foreign government: but one who will not give them up to President Fillmore, though he send the Mississippi or the whole American Fleet to escort them to Washington.
The Haynaus of Austria have just as equitable a plea for persecuting the Hungarians for their language and color, as our Haynaus have for persecuting the colored population, and the white, and colored descendants of the female victims of African pirates. And to the late message of Governor Hunt, we have no right to oppose any outrage upon human rights, if sanctioned by a sovereign state upon its own citizens! Both Hungarian and American slaves, must therefore hold their peace, until their gracious masters, in their clemency, banish them to Liberia, or some other foreign land. Henry Clay, however, thinks the States will emancipate their slaves, when our vast country becomes so populous as to reduce the price of labor below the expense of keeping slaves! Why do not such men come out at once and advocate the perpetuity of slavery with the South? We of the North should then not be deceived. Such men must know that the perpetuity and extension of slavery is the settled feeling of the South, and that colonization is one of the means to perpetuate it. It is their vacillating course which has kept slavery alive, and which I fear will keep it alive until the oppressed millions in our Government are joined by other oppressed millions from the North, the East, the South, and the Isles of the seas, who will "come up to the help of the Lord against the mighty,"when "the blood will come up unto the horses' bridles." To avert this catastrophe, let every friend of justice, and humanity "cry aloud, and spare not," - convince the nation if possible, of the necessity of immediately applying the remedy recommended by Washington, "Legislative Enactment."
Ethiope, Jr.