For Frederick Douglass' Paper.

COLUMBUS, Oct. 31, 1854

MR. EDITOR:—I will pursue the discussion on the subject of "Prejudice" at the Jerry Rescue Celebration, by introducing C. L. Remond as the next speaker.

Mr. R. "did not perfectly agree with his friend Green," though he did not define his own position, further than to intimate that the more respectable the appearance of a colored person, the more liable they were to be insulted. "That if he had passed down the main street of Syracuse a drunken woodsawyer, he would not have been called a 'damn negro,' as he was for trying to be decent like other men." I think this assertion can be sustained by facts. But will not these facts prove that the best method of avoiding the inconvenience arising from this prejudice, is for the "colored people" to become distinguished for "drunkenness, immorality, and indecency?" Do they not furnish arguments against their mental, moral, and religious improvement?

Mr. R. is evidently confused. His reasoning faculties and his feelings appear to be in conflict. Like a strong man in the mire, he struggles onward, borne down by the weight of his own argument, until at last he is forced to exclaim in an audible voice, that the cause of his present difficulty was the result of his "attempting to occupy a position of respectability." While Mr. Remond labors to agree with his friends who
assert that "prejudice is against ," his description of a , that can successfully evade its influence, is worse than the prejudice itself. It will be the fault of Mr. Remond, and those who believe with him, that the cause of "prejudice is ," and who, like him, are capable of comprehending the , that will destroy it[s] potency, if they suffer under its baneful influence.

But would it not be far better for them, rather than stoop to the ignominy and degradation this prejudice demands, to stand boldly erect, and say to their persecutors, light your fires, empty your coffers of indignation? We accept its whispering as the poisoned chalice of your inhumanity. We accept it as the standard of national morality and religion—as the barometer of American brotherhood. We accept it as your recognition of our manhood—as the indisputable evidence of our progress—as the exalted standard of our enlightenment, and as the harbinger of our redemption.

Mr. 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. next arose and related an anecdote about "Daniel Webster going down to Cape Cod with his wife, and being refused admission at a hotel because being suspected of being a negro married to a white woman." I confess I am at a loss to know which side of the argument Mr. G. aimed to support by his illustration. I am inclined to believe that he wished to demonstrate to the audience that the whole subject of prejudice was ridiculous. But, to be serious, the question to be determined by Mr. Garrison's anecdote is, whether it was Mr. Webster's color, or his condition, that placed him in such an inconvenient dilemma. If it was the former, his demonstration will be all comprehensive, and to the untutored mind, as clear as "holy writ." If it be the latter, then I regard it as being abstruse and wrapped in ambiguity; and must leave it to the believers on that side of the question to explain. There is one thing, however, morally certain, that, until there is a radical regeneration of public sentiment on this subject, neither Messrs. Brown, Remond, Pennington, Douglass, or Ward, nor any other colored men, alike distinguished, need expect to travel through this country, especially where they are unknown, without having to encounter this prejudice, so long as they retain their present complexions—when men of such giant intellects and world-wide reputations as Daniel Webster and Thomas Corwin* receive such insults in their own States, and from their own constituents, for no other visible reason than that they observed their sable complexions fell below the "fleckering shade of white."

If the of prejudice lies in , and the EXALTED CONDITION of these men as learned lawyers, profound jurists, able defenders of the Constitution, skilful diplomatists, grave Senators, and honored representatives of the people, and the recipients of power and popular favor throughout the length and breadth of the land, would not shield them from this ignoble prejudice against complexion, what hope is there (I respectfully ask) for any person of a "sable hue" to reach any exalted standard of condition, that will protect him from its deleterious influence? He may be commissioned to this country from abroad, robed in the knighthood of royalty, with literary, civic and ecclesiastical honors, the accredited representative of a foreign government, clothed with power to stay the avenging hand of desolating war, and civil discord, yet "popular prejudice" would disfranchise his government by rejecting him as a negotiator at the Council of Peace, merely because he was "not white." He may have occupied the highest rank in the medical profession in his own country, and came here with his mind stored with medical science, and clothed with medical honors, capable, like an angel of mercy, of staying the onward march of the Cholera, conquering the plague, or curing Consumption; yet this vulgar prejudice would deny him citizenship, because he was "." He may have lived an honored instrument in the hands of Providence to bless mankind, and died lamented as one of earth's "greatest benefactors," and if his sainted spirit should be permitted to ascend to Heaven, and receive a prophetic commission from the Most High to revisit the scenes of his earthly labors, and proclaim to the people of this nation that the "cup of their iniquity was full"—"their doom sealed"— and that they should either repent or be destroyed, the "hydra-headed monster, prejudice," would, doubtless, exclaim, in "popular derision," that he .

I have drawn this faint sketch to show that no condition, represented by a "colored skin," can escape its victimizing power.—This "prejudice" is of such colossal stature, that no imagination has conceived its height, nor religion fathomed its depth, nor philosophical science measured its circumference.

I will try and notice your argument in my next.

W. W.