The Church is the Bulwark of Slavery: An Address Delivered in Boston, Massachusetts, on May 25, 1842
THE CHURCH IS THE BULWARK OF SLAVERY: AN ADDRESS DELIVERED IN BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS, ON 25 MAY 1842
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 Garrison, and Stephen S. Foster 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 Remond, 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‘s 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 chapel.1Meeting place of Boston's Second Christian Society, the Charan 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. Hilton,2Described 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 alt-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 pew 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 “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-Bedford, 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 Church 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's 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.