THE SOUTHERN STYLE OF PREACHING TO SLAVES: AN ADDRESS DELIVERED IN BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS, ON 28 JANUARY 1842, at Fanueil HallFaneuil Hall, Boston, Massachusetts

Tenth Annual Report of the Board of Managers of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society (Boston, 1842), 18-19. Another text in Liberator, 4 February 1842.

On the evening of 28 January 1842, some 4000 people gathered in Boston’s Faneuil Hall, to attend a public meeting sponsored by the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery SocietyMassachusetts Anti-Slavery Society

. Called to promote the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, the meeting focused on the antislavery significance of the “Address From the People of Ireland to Their Countrymen and Countrywomen in America," which black abolitionist Charles Lenox RemondRemond, Charles Lenox

Charles Lenox Remond (1810-73), the first black lecturer hired by any antislavery society, was born in Salem, Massachusetts, to the daughter of a black hero of the American Revolution and a former slave from Curaçao. In his youth, he learned about the horrors of slavery from his father and experienced the segregation and discrimination practiced by Northern whites. In the late 1820s and early 1830s, Remond read David Walker’s Appeal and became acquainted with William Lloyd Garrison, which led him to dedicate his life to abolitionism. Remond became active in reform movements at an early age. A member of the Colored Association of Massachusetts when it merged with the New England Anti-Slavery Society in 1833, he became an officer in the latter organization. He became an agent for the Liberator and joined the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society shortly thereafter. In 1838 he began lecturing for the American Anti-Slavery Society. Both his color and his ability made him a very popular speaker in both the United States and Great Britain, where he attended the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention as a delegate in 1840 in London. Remond was the sole black lecturer for antislavery societies until Frederick Douglass began speaking in 1842. For a time, Remond and Douglass worked the lecture circuit together. Douglass admired Remond, the more experienced speaker, and named a son for him. Remond traveled and lectured in the British Isles for some sixteen months. Upon his return, Remond was employed as a lecture agent by the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. Through the 1840s, however, Remond remained a steadfast Garrisonian while Douglass began to favor political action to end slavery, and their friendship suffered. Their close association was troubled as a rift between Douglass and Garrison threatened, and in 1852 Remond announced his intention to cancel his subscription to Frederick Douglass' Paper in protest against Douglass's adoption of non-Garrisonian views of the U.S. Constitution. Their goals, however, remained the same, and like Douglass, Remond recruited black soldiers for the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth Infantry Regiment during the Civil War. After the war, just before his death, Remond urged abolitionists to continue their fight by combatting the racial prejudice that persisted in both the North and South after the end of slavery. Illness curtailed his reform activities after the war. Les Wallace, "Charles Lenox Remond: The Lost Prince of Abolitionism," NHB, 40:696-701 (May-June 1977); William E. Ward, "Charles Lenox Remond: Black Abolitionist, 1838-1873" (Ph.D. diss., Clark University, 1977); FDP, 20 May 1852; New York Daily Times, 26 December 1873; NNE, 8 January 1874; Pease and Pease, They Who Would Be Free, 46; NCAB, 2:303; DAB, 15:499-500. had brought to the United States in December. Irish statesman Daniel O‘ConnellO'Connell, Daniel

Daniel O'Connell (1775-1847), Irish lawyer and member of Parliament, played a major role in both the British and American antislavery movements. Converted to abolitionism in 1824 after hearing English abolitionist James Cropper, O'Connell balanced conflicting commitments to black freedom and Irish independence throughout his career. A leader of the movement to repeal the Act of Union between England and Ireland, as well as a participant in the related campaign to remove the civil restrictions imposed upon Catholics, O'Connell saw the bill for Catholic Emancipation pass Parliament in 1829 with strong support from antislavery politicians. Four years later he marshaled crucial Irish votes needed for passage of the Emancipation Act of 1833, inaugurating gradual abolition in the British West Indies. On 1838 he narrowly averted a duel with U.S. Ambassador Andrew Stevenson, whom he accused of being a slave breeder. Identified with William Lloyd Garrison throughout the 1830s, O'Connell supported the seating of women delegates at the World's Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840 and made numerous attempts to rally abolitionist sentiment among Irish Americans in the years immediately following. O'Connell often suffered high political costs as a result of such activities, particularly in light of diminished U.S. support for the Irish repeal movement. Although some Garrisonians criticized O'Connell for vacillation and political expediency, American reformers of all persuasions lavished praise on the "Irish Liberator" during the post- Civil War era. Oliver MacDonagh, The Emancipationist: Daniel O'Connell, 1830-47 (New York, 1989); Gilbert Osofsky, "Abolitionists, Irish Immigrants, and the Dilemmas of Romantic Nationalism," AHR, 80:889-912 (October 1975); Douglas C. Riach, "Daniel O'Connell and American Anti-Slavery," Irish Historical Studies, 20:3-25 (March 1976); Howard Temperley, "The O'Connell-Stevenson Contretemps: A Reflection of the Anglo-American Slavery Issue," JNH, 47:217-33 (October 1962); Henry Boylan, A Dictionary of Irish Biography, 3d ed. (Niwot, Colo., 1998), 306-08; DNB, 14:816-34. , temperance advocate Theobald MathewMathew, Theobald

Regarded in Ireland as the “Apostle of Temperance,“ Father Theobald Mathew (1790–1856) was born in County Tipperary to a family related to the local landed gentry. He was a Franciscan friar of the Capuchin Order and, after his ordination in 1814, was assigned to a mission in Cork, where he became popular for his charitable activities in behalf of the Catholic poor. In April 1838, after his conversion to temperance, he founded the Total Abstinence Society of Cork, which discountenanced the use of spirits except for medicinal purposes. It is said that Mathew personally converted six million of the Irish people to teetotalism. Douglass witnessed one ceremony where one thousand postulants took the pledge from Mathew. As famine ravaged southern Ireland in the 1840s, Mathew devoted most of his energy to feeding and caring for the destitute. After Mathew’s death the Irish temperance movement faded rapidly. Rogers, Theobald Mathew, James Bermingham, A Memoir of the Very Rev. Theobald Mathew, with an Account of the Rise and Progress of Temperance in Ireland (New York, 1841), 15–114; Harrison, Drink and the Victorians. 103, 126, 165–68, 130, 211, 334, 390; Douglass to Garrison, 16 September 1845, in Lib., 10 October 1845. , and 60,000 other signatories urged Irish Americans to “treat the colored people as your equals” and to “CLING BY THE ABOLITIONISTS.” Abolitionists Jonathan Peckham MillerMiller, Jonathan Peckham

, George BradburnBradburn, George

Son of a woolens manufacturer in Attleboro, Massachusetts. George Bradburn (1806-80) trained for the Unitarian ministry, but subsequently devoted his energies to championing numerous secular reforms. Bradburn also acted as an agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1839, and he attended the World's Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840. He was not a strict Garrisonian however, opposing all propositions in favor of dissolving the Union and favoring political means to accomplish the abolition of slavery. Bradburn represented Nantucket as a Whig in the state legislature (1839- 42), where he led the successful effort to repeal Massachusetts's antimiscegenation law. In the 1840s he lectured for the (Garrisonians and traveled with Douglass on many occasions. He later joined the Free Soil party and edited two Free Soil newspapers, the Pioneer and Herald of Freedom and the True Democrat. In addition to abolitionism. Bradburn supported women 's rights, temperance, pacifism, and an end to capital punishment. Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, Eleventh Annual Report: Presented to the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society by its Board of Directors (Boston, 1843 ), 44, 90-91; idem. Twelfth Annual Report: Presented to the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society (Boston. 1844), 34; George Bradburn, A Memorial of George Bradburn, comp. Frances H. Bradburn (Boston, 1883). , James Canning FullerFuller, James Canning

, and Wendell PhillipsPhillips, Wendell

Boston-born and Harvard-educated Wendell Phillips (1811-84) ranked second only to Garrison in influence in the American Anti-Slavery Society in the 1840s and 1850s. Bored with the legal profession and influenced by his antislavery fiancee, Ann Terry Greene, Phillips dedicated himself to abolitionism beginning in 1837. A highly gifted orator, Phillips was in demand as a lecturer even in nonabolitionist circles. Besides abolition, Phillips championed woman suffrage, prohibition, penal reform, Indian rights, and legislative protection for workers. When Garrison retired from the presidency of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1865, Phillips assumed the post and led abolitionists until passage of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870. James Brewer Stewart, Wendell Phillips: Liberty's Hero (Baton Rouge, La., 1986); Irving H. Bartlett, Wendell Phillips: Brahmin Radical (Boston, 1961); DAB, 14:546-47. praised the influence of Irish intellectuals and reformers on their own antislavery convictions. Presiding officer William Lloyd 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. then introduced Douglass in tersely dramatic fashion. “It is recorded in holy writ that a beast once spoke,” 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. declared. “A greater miracle

is here tonight. A chattel becomes a man.” The meeting proceeded smoothly and Garrison’s fears that it might be disrupted proved groundless. The audience, which included many Irishmen present to hear the “Irish Address," particularly appreciated Douglass’s parody of a slaveholder’s sermon. Moved by the appeals to freedom in behalf of American slaves and Irish nationalists, an unidentified “friend of universal liberty” rose from the gallery and, obtaining permission to speak, denounced the “factory system” and its contributions to “slavery in the free States.” The “Irish Address" is reprinted in ., 11 March 1842. See also ., 4 February 1842; Garrison to George W. Benson, [28], 29 January 1842, Garrison to Richard D. Webb, 27 February 1842, in Merrill and Ruchames, Garrison Letters, 3 : 46-48, 53; [Wendell Phillips Garrison and Francis Jackson Garrison], William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879: The Story of His Life Told By His Children, 4 vols. (1885; New York, 1969), 3 : 43-51
(hereafter cited as Garrison Life).

I rejoice to be permitted, as well as to be able to speak upon this subject in Faneuil Hall. I will not detain you long, for I stand here a slave. (No! no! from the meeting.) A slave at least in the eye of the Constitution. (No! no! with emphasis from the meeting.) It is a slave by the laws of the South, who now addresses you. (That’s it! from the meeting.) My back is scarred by the lash—that I could show you. I would, I could make visible the wounds of this system upon my soul. I merely rose to return you thanks for this cheering sight, representing as I do, the two and a half millions remaining in that bondage from which I have escaped. I thank God that I have the opportunity to do it. Those bondmen, whose cause you are called to espouse, are entirely deprived of the privilege of speaking for themselves. They are goods and chattels, not men. They are denied the privileges of the Christian—they are denied the rights of citizens. They are refused the claims of the man. They are not allowed the rights of the husband and the father. They may not name the name of Liberty. It is to save them from all this, that you are called. Do it!—and they who are ready to perish shall bless you! Do it! and all good men will cheer you onward! Do it! and God will reward you for the deed; and your own consciences will testify that you have been true to the demands of the religion of Christ. (Applause)

But what a mockery of His religion is preached at the South! I have been called upon to describe the style in which it is set forth. And I find our ministers there learn to do it at the northern colleges. I used to know they went away somewhere I did not know where, and came back ministers; and this is the way they would preach. They would take a text—

say this;—“Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” And this is the way they would apply it. They would explain it to mean, “slaveholders, do unto slaveholders what you would have them do unto you: ”—and then looking impudently up to the slaves’ gallery, (for they have a place set apart for us, though it is said they have no prejudice, just as is done here in the northern churches;) looking high up to the poor colored drivers and the rest, and spreading his hands gracefully abroad, he says, (mimicking,) “And you too, my friends, have souls of infinite value—souls that will live through endless happiness or misery in eternity. Oh, labor diligently to make your calling and election sure. Oh, receive into your souls these words of the holy apostle—‘Servants, be obedient unto your masters.” (Shouts of laughter and applause.) Oh, consider the wonderful goodness of God! Look at your hard, horny hands, your strong muscular frames, and see how mercifully he has adapted you to the duties you are to fulfill (continued laughter and applause) while to your masters, who have slender frames and long delicate fingers, he has given brilliant intellects, that they may do the thinking, while you do the working.”¹This is the fullest of several early accounts of Douglass's famous Slaveholder’s Sermon," which he gave often during his youthful days as an abolitionist lecturer. The parody is based in part on personal observation and apparently in part on William Meade, ed., Sermons Addressed to Masters and Servants . . . Published in the Year 1743, by the Rev. Thomas Bacon . . . With Other Tracts and Dialogues . . . (Winchester, Va., 1813) and idem, Sermons, Dialogues and Narratives for Servants, to be Read to Them in Families; Abridged, Altered and Adapted to Their Condition (Richmond, 1836), two of the better-known manuals written by Southern clergymen on the religious instruction of slaves. The sermons in the latter manual were somewhat modified versions of those in Bacon’s tract. William S. Jenkins, Pro-Slavery Thought in the Old South (Chapel Hill, 1935), 14-15n., 214n. (Shouts of applause.) It has been said here at the North, that the slaves have the gospel preached to them. But you will see what sort of a gospel it is:—a gospel which, more than chains, or whips, or thumb-screws, gives perpetuity to this horrible system.