THE CHURCH IS THE BULWARK OF SLAVERY: AN ADDRESS DELIVERED IN BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS, ON 25 MAY 1842, at Chardon Street ChapelChardon Street Chapel, Boston, Massachusetts

Chardon Street Chapel, 31 New Chardon Street, Boston, Massachusetts 02114 Meeting place of Boston's Second Christian Society, the Chardon Street Chapel is best remembered as the site of a famous 1840 Convention of the Friends of Universal Reform. During the 1837–42 ministry of Millerite spokesman Joshua V. Himes, Chardon Street Chapel hosted numerous gatherings of abolitionists and other reformers. Sidney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, 1972), 479–80; Alice Felt Tyler, Freedom's Ferment: Phases of American Social History to 1860 (Minneapolis, 1944), 46; Stimpson's Boston Directory (Boston, 1840), 29, ibid., (Boston, 1843), 27; Garrison and Garrison, Garrison Life, 2 : 420–25.

Boston Courier, 26 May 1842. Another text in Liberator, 3 June 1842.

From 24 to 27 May 1842 the annual convention of the New England AntiSlavery Society met in Boston’s Chardon Street Chapel, a place described

by one disgruntled spectator as the “remotest, obscurest, most uninviting public apartment in all the city." On the first day Nathaniel P. Rogers, 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. , and Stephen S. FosterFoster, Stephen Symonds

Born in Canterbury, New Hampshire, radical abolitionist Stephen Symonds Foster (1809-81) studied at Dartmouth College. In 1837, a year before his graduation, he helped to organize the New Hampshire Young Men's Anti-Slavery Society. Foster briefly attended Union Theological Seminary in New York, but by 1839 he had repudiated the ministry. He developed his criticisms of American churches most fully in The Brotherhood of Thieves; or, A True Picture of the American Church Clergy (1843). His practice of interrupting a church service to speak out against complicity with slavery frequently provoked violent reaction. While Foster and his wife, Abby Kelley, whom he married in 1815, were agents for the American Anti-Slavery Society for nearly twenty years, their relationship with the Garrisonians was at best one of strained cooperation. Although Foster believed that the Constitution was a proslavery document, he periodically dabbled in politics. In 1843-44 he endorsed the Liberty party. In the late 1850s, having altered his view of the nature of the Constitution, Foster sought to establish a disunion party "whose avowed aim. . .[would] be the overthrow of the government. . .& whose will. . .[would] be expressed through the ballot box." In the mid-1850s he also argued in favor of slave rebellion in his Revolution the Only Remedy for Slavery (1855). A proponent of distributing land to the freedmen, Foster was disappointed with federal Reconstruction policies. He devoted the last years of his life to agitating on behalf of temperance and women's rights. Parker Pillsbury, Acts of the Anti-Slavery Apostles (Concord, N.H., 1883), 123-55; Lillie B. Chace Wyman, "Reminiscences of Two Abolitionists," New England Magazine, 27:536-50 (January 1903); Parker Pillsbury, "Stephen Symonds Foster,'' Granite Monthly, 5:369-75 (August 1882); Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease, Bound with Them in Chains: A Biographical History of the Antislavery Movement (Westport, Conn., 1972), 191-217; Louis Filler, "Parker Pillsbury: An Anti-Slavery Apostle," NEQ, 19:315-37 (September 1946); ACAB, 2:514-15; NCAB, 2:328-29; DAB, 6:558-59. introduced resolutions endorsing moral suasion and condemning the proslavery influence of the American church and clergy. Douglass spoke during debate over these resolutions on 25 May. Praising the eloquence of both Douglass and 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. , a writer in the Concord (N. H.) Herald of Freedom felt that the black orators had “already made color not only honorable but enviable. . . . If they were politicians or divines, the press would stretch itself to speak of them, and magnify their eloquence.” Douglass spoke again on 27 May when Edmund Quincy'sQuincy, Edmund

Son of Josiah Quincy, a Boston Federalist leader and president of Harvard University, Edmund Quincy (1807-77) joined the abolitionists in reaction to the murder of Elijah Lovejoy in 1837. A close associate of William Lloyd Garrison, Quincy was the corresponding secretary of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society from 1844 to 1853. He served on many other abolitionist committees, contributed frequently to Garrisonian publications, and often edited the Liberator during Garrison's absences. NS, 21 January 1848; Tribute of the Massachusetts Historical Society to the Memory of Edmund Quincy and John Lothrop Motley (Boston, 1877), 6; NCAB, 6:93-94; DAB, 15:306-07. resolution to extend “anti-slavery fellowship” to churches which excluded slaveholders came up for discussion. No text of Douglass ’s remarks on the second occasion has been located. Lib., 10 June 1842.

Yesterday forenoon, about eleven o’clock, we found ourself, for the first time in our life, in the Chardon-street chapelChardon Street Chapel, Boston, Massachusetts

Chardon Street Chapel, 31 New Chardon Street, Boston, Massachusetts 02114 Meeting place of Boston's Second Christian Society, the Chardon Street Chapel is best remembered as the site of a famous 1840 Convention of the Friends of Universal Reform. During the 1837–42 ministry of Millerite spokesman Joshua V. Himes, Chardon Street Chapel hosted numerous gatherings of abolitionists and other reformers. Sidney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, 1972), 479–80; Alice Felt Tyler, Freedom's Ferment: Phases of American Social History to 1860 (Minneapolis, 1944), 46; Stimpson's Boston Directory (Boston, 1840), 29, ibid., (Boston, 1843), 27; Garrison and Garrison, Garrison Life, 2 : 420–25. . When we entered, with others who appeared to belong, like ourself just then, to the loafing species, a colored man was addressing a numerous assembly, with great fluency and correctness, endeavoring to prove, by fact and argument, that the Christian Church, “so called,” is the bulwark of slavery and the great obstacle in the progress of human liberty. The speaker’s name, we understood, was Douglass, and we were further informed that he was a fugitive from slavery. We have seldom heard a better speech before a popular assembly—better, we mean, as to the language and the manner. Many of the speakers who followed him, and of a lighter complexion, men, who boasted that they were ministers, and who had, doubtless, the advantage of education, which the man of color could never have enjoyed, might well be desirous of emulating the appropriateness of his elocution and gesticulation, and the grammatical accuracy of his sentences.

After several speeches had been made by white abolitionists, another colored man, Mr. HiltonHilton, John Telemachus

Described by one recent scholar as “the most active Boston Negro in the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society," John Telemachus Hilton (1802–64) is remembered principally for his militant leadership in the campaign to desegregate Boston's public schools. A barber by trade, Hilton moved to Massachusetts from his native state of Pennsylvania as a young man. He was a member of Boston’s First Independent Baptist Church, the black-sponsored Adelphic Union Library Association, the Boston Vigilance Committee, the Prince Hall Masons, and the Board of Managers of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. During the 1840s Hilton and William C. Nell tried unsuccessfully to force school authorities to close Boston’s all-black Smith School and permit black children to attend classes with whites. The major weapon in the desegregation fight was a boycott which Hilton helped initiate in 1844 by withdrawing his daughter from Smith School and enrolling her in an integrated school in nearby Cambridge. The boycott as well as a subsequent law suit proved futile, but in 1855 after several vigorous petition campaigns, the Massachusetts legislature banned compulsory racial segregation in the state’s public schools. By this time, however, Hilton had joined the suburban exodus of Boston’s black taxpayers by moving to Brighton, Massachusetts, where he resided until his death. Mabee, Black Freedom, 165–67, 174–77; Donald Martin Jacobs, “A History of the Boston Negro From the Revolution to the Civil War" (PhD. diss., Boston University, 1968), 198–99, 223, 248; John T. Hilton, “To The Abolitionists," The Liberty Bell (Boston, 1844), 231–32; Lib” 25 March 1864. , arose, and modestly asked leave to

state a few facts connected with the topic under discussion. He mentioned several incidents that had occurred in different churches in Cambridge, to show that, notwithstanding the cry in favor of universal freedom and equality, the colored man was not admitted to full participation of the ordinary courtesies of life, even among those, who claimed to be abolitionists on Christian principles. He stated, also, the case of a colored man who bought a pewBrinsley, Frederick

Frederick Brinsley, was a Boston black man who, in the process of collecting a debt, acquired legal title to pew number 38 on the lower floor of Park Street Church. Unable to sell the pew for a reasonable price, Brinsley decided to occupy it with his family in defiance of segregationist practices. In March 1830 he was officially warned to stay in the church's “upper galleries” or “hazzard the consequences,” and his next attempt to enter the pew was blocked by a constable. Later the same month the church's Prudential Committee adopted regulations “to prevent a person who might from any cause be obnoxious . . . from becoming the proprietor of a pew.” E. S. Abdy, Journal of A Residence and Tour in the United States of North America From April, 1833 to October, 1834, 3 vols. (London, 1835), 1 : 133–35; Lib., 15, 23 April 1864. in Park-street Church in Boston,³Hilton alludes to Frederick Brinsley, a Boston black man who, in the process of collecting a debt, acquired legal title to pew number 38 on the lower floor of Park Street Church. Unable to sell the pew for a reasonable price, Brinsley decided to occupy it with his family in defiance of segregationist practices. In March 1830 he was officially warned to stay in the church's “upper galleries” or “hazzard the consequences,” and his next attempt to enter the pew was blocked by a constable. Later the same month the church's Prudential Committee adopted regulations “to prevent a person who might from any cause be obnoxious . . . from becoming the proprietor of a pew.” E. S. Abdy, Journal of A Residence and Tour in the United States of North America From April, 1833 to October, 1834, 3 vols. (London, 1835), 1 : 133–35; Lib., 15, 23 April 1864. and was prevented from sitting in it with his family.

At length, Douglass again took the floor, to state some facts, which occurred at New-BedfordNew Bedford, Massachusetts

, the place of his residence. He related several anecdotes in a sort of sarcastic tone, showing the inconsistency of the professions of many of the Christian Churches which rail against slavery and uphold it by their practice. He stated that at an administration of the Lord’s Supper in the Methodist Episcopal ChurchElm Street Methodist Church, New Bedford, Massachusetts

at New-Bedford,⁴The Reverend Isaac Bonney's Elm Street Methodist Church. the elements were not administered to the colored people, until all the white people had been served; that then the minister invited the colored ones to come forward and partake, “for that God is no respecter of persons.” It seems that this minister was one of Mr. Douglass ’s auditors, and sat near him, while he was making this statement. The tone and manner

with which Douglass pronounced this quotation, imitating, apparently, the voice and manner of the Methodist minister, must have out like a two-edged sword.

He proceeded to give an account of Elder Knapp'sKnapp, Elder

operations in New-Bedford. The Elder, he said, got up a great revival, and among its subjects were some colored ones; for you know (he said) when Brother Knapp throws his net into the sea, he cannot expect to catch all white fish; there will be some black ones, but he culls them out after he draws the net to the shore. On one occasion, there was a baptism of several white ladies and one black one. After the baptism, the sacrament of the Supper was administered. The colored woman, who had just been baptized, took a seat in a pew nearer to the table than one of the white ones, who entertained the same hope, and had just been baptized in the same water. The cup was offered first to the colored woman, and then to the white one; but this last, instead of receiving the cup, refused to take it, and immediately left the meeting house!

The speaker related other incidents, illustrating the proposition that the Church, so called, was an obstacle in the progress of the abolition movement. We left the chapel, and left him speaking, but not without a sentiment of respect for his talent, his good sense, and his zeal in a cause, in which, at least, he and his unfortunate race must be commended to the good wishes of the world.