SOUTHERN SLAVERY AND NORTHERN RELIGION: TWO ADDRESSES DELIVERED IN CONCORD, NEW HAMPSHIRE, ON 11 FEBRUARY 1844, at the Court HouseCourt House, Concord, N.H.

Concord New Hampshire Court House, 163 N. Main St., Concord, New Hampshire 03301

Concord (N.H.) Herald of Freedom, 16 February 1844.

“Do not despair of New-Hampshire!” 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. assured Parker PillsburyPillsbury, Parker

The outspoken abolitionist orator, editor, and author Parker Pillsbury (1809-98) was born in Massachusetts but moved to Henniker, New Hampshire, where he farmed and worked as a wagoner until 1835. The local Congregational church there encouraged him to pursue the ministry. Pillsbury graduated from New Hampshire's Gilmanton Theological Seminary in 1838 and studied an additional year at Andover before accepting a church in Loudon, New Hampshire. Converted to abolitionism in Andover, Pillsbury incurred the displeasure of his congregation with sharp attacks on the churches' complicity with slavery. After his license to preach was revoked in 1840, he became lecturing agent for the New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and American antislavery societies, posts he held for over two decades. He edited the Concord (N.H.) Herald of Freedom in 1840 and again in 1845 and 1846 and the National Anti-Slavery Standard in 1866. He lectured widely, often in the company of Stephen S. Foster, and earned a reputation for his successful use of nonresistance in dealing with hostile crowds. Although he served on the executive committee of the New Hampshire Non-Resistance Society, he was among the strongest defenders of John Brown after the Harpers Ferry raid. During the Civil War, Pillsbury criticized Union war aims, especially before the Emancipation Proclamation, and in 1865 broke with Garrison over the necessity for continued activity by the American Anti-Slavery Society. Pillsbury helped to draft the constitution of the feminist American Equal Rights Association in 1865, served as vice president of the New Hampshire Woman Suffrage Association, and in 1868 and 1869 edited a weekly, Revolution, with Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Pillsbury completed his abolition memoirs, Acts of the Anti-Slavery Apostles, in 1883. Stacey M. Robertson, Parker Pillsbury: Radical Abolitionist, Male Feminist (Ithaca, N.Y., 2000); James M. McPherson, The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Princeton, N.J., 1964), 59-60, 100-102, 305-07; Mabee, Black Freedom, 112, 221-23, 329; Filler, "Parker Pillsbury," 315-37; DAB, 14:608-09. on 23 February 1841: “It is true her religion turns out to be devoid of humanity, and her republicanism is of a spurious quality. It is true, a very large majority of her inhabitants seem to be deaf to the cries of a bleeding humanity, and to glory in their opposition to the sacred cause of emancipation. Still, I renew the injunction, do not despair of New-Hampshire! ” Six months later, 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. was ejected from Concord ’s North MeetinghouseNorth Meetinghouse

and her South ChurchSouth Church, Concord, N.H.

when he attempted to make an antislavery appeal. Three years later, in 1844, it appears that the citizens of Concord had little modified their opinions of abolitionists, for Douglass and his associates had a difficult time finding a place to hold their antislavery meeting.

Nathaniel P. RogersRogers, Nathaniel Peabody

New Hampshire abolitionist Nathaniel Peabody Rogers (1794-1846) left a law practice in Plymouth to edit the Concord abolitionist weekly Herald of Freedom in 1838. He also worked to desegregate transportation facilities, promote temperance, and end capital punishment. In the mid-1840s Rogers quarreled bitterly with other Garrisonian abolitionists, charging that disunionism carried an implicit threat of war. Perry, Radical Abolitionism, 162-63; Mabee, Black Freedom, 116, 123; Robert Adams, "Nathaniel Peabody Rogers: 1794-1846," NEQ, 20:365-76 (September 1947); NCAB, 2:320. , editor of the antislavery journal Herald of Freedom, reported on the two speeches which Douglass gave in Concord on 11 February 1844. “He is one of the most impressive and majestic speakers I have ever heard,” Rogers observed. At the second meeting, Stephen S. Foster spoke after Douglass. Rogers declared that “Frederick ought not to have been followed at all. That speech ought to have been the last, for the

time. It could not well be surpassed, and if it could be equalled, it was not needed.” He found the second meeting “one of our greatest single meetings, for talent and spirit.” Soon after these speeches were given, Douglass was hard at work writing his Narrative. Garrison to Parker Pillsbury, 23 February 1841, in Merrill and Ruchames, Garrison Letters, 3 : 15; Nathaniel Bouton, The History of Concord . . . (Concord, N.H., 1856), 445–46; Quarles, FD, 34.

Frederick Douglass lectured here Sunday evening, to a crowded Court HouseCourt House, Concord, N.H.

Concord New Hampshire Court House, 163 N. Main St., Concord, New Hampshire 03301 . He was here during all Sunday, and spoke at our Sunday meetings, and it was known generally to the people here, and there was great curiosity to see him, and hear his eloquence. But no meeting house was offered to him,—or to the people, rather, who wished to hear him—and would have been profoundly interested in the grandeur of his speech. He had to speak, and the audience had to hear, in an inconvenient, uncomfortable room. The sects know here, that Anti-slavery will never again ask them for a meeting house. We will furnish them orators of the first cast, and they are in famishing want of good speaking—but they must come to the cold and noisy Court Room and dirty Town Hall, to hear, so long as they shut up their clean and comfortable synagogues against us. We have asked for them long enough. It would be dishonorable begging, to ask again. If the meeting house is capable of being opened to the truth, they had better offer them to us. I believe it is not capable of it—and therefore that they will never open them to anti-slavery. I would here suggest that there ought to be a Lyceum Hall erected in this place, where TRUTH could be spoken. What a commentary on the character of the numerous Temples here. I tell the people the Truth can never be admitted into an Idol Temple.

Douglass spoke excellently Sunday afternoon, and to a pretty numerous audience—many of them not accustomed to attend our meetings.—He was advertised as a “fugitive from slavery.” He said he was not a fugitive from slavery—but a fugitive slave. He was a fugitive, he said, not from slavery—but in slavery. To get from it—he must go beyond the limits of the American Union. He asked them why it was that he—such as they saw him before them, must wander about in their midst, a fugitive and a slave. He demanded the reason. It is because of your Religion, he sternly replied, which sanctifies the system under which I suffer, and dooms me to it, and the millions of my brethren now in bondage. Your religion justifies our tyrants, and you are yourselves

our enslavers. I see my enslavers here in Concord, and before my eyes—if any are here who countenance the church and the religion of your country. Other influences helped sustain the system of slavery, he said, but this is its sanctioner and main support.

In the evening Douglass made a masterly and most impressive speech. The house was crowded, and with the best of our people—no clergy—and but few of the bigots, who are past hearing. He began by a calm, deliberate and very simple narrative of his life. He did not detail personal sufferings—though he said he might—if inclined to. His fate had been mild compared to that of slaves generally. He, to be sure, had to go naked, pretty much during the earlier years of childhood, and feed at a trough like a pig, under the care of his old grandmother,Bailey, Betsey (Douglass's grandmother)

Betsey Bailey (1774-1849), the maternal grandmother of Frederick Douglass, grew up a slave on the Skinner plantation in Talbot County, Maryland. In 1797 she became the property of Aaron Anthony, who acquired her and several other slaves through his marriage to Ann Skinner. Anthony moved her to his farm on Tuckahoe Creek in Talbot County. She married Isaac Bailey, a free black who earned his living as a sawyer and lived with him in her cabin. There she bore nine daughters and three sons. She was also a midwife, a service for which Anthony paid her. Upon Anthony's death in 1826, Bailey was inherited by Andrew Skinner Anthony, Aaron's son; when Andrew died in 1833, she became the slave of John Planner Anthony. Despite this succession of masters and the death of her own husband, she remained in her cabin on the Tuckahoe Creek farm, living alone, nearly destitute, and going blind. In 1840 Thomas Auld, John Anthony's uncle, learned of Bailey's condition and sent for her, caring for her in his Talbot County home until her death. Douglass to Thomas Auld, 3 September 1848, 3 September 1849, in NS, 8 September 1848, 7 September 1849, reprinted in Lib., 22 September 1848, 14 September 1849; Aaron Anthony Slave Distribution, 22 October 1827, Talbot County Distributions, V.JP#D, 58-59, MdTCH: Aaron Anthony, Inventory of Negroes, Distribution of Negroes, folders 71, 77, Aaron Anthony Ledger A, 1790-1818, folder 94, Aaron Anthony Ledger B, 1812-26, folders 77, 159, 165-68. Anthony Family Papers, Harriet L. Anthony, annotated copy of Bondage and Freedom, folders 93, 180, all in Dodge Collection, MdAA; Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 8, 16-20, 167. who, past her labor, was turned out, charged to dig her own subsistence, and that of a few little ones, out of a patch of ground allotted her. These little ones were separated from their mothers, that they might early be without ties of kindred. He did not remember his mother, I think he said, and never knew who was his father. He never knew in his first six years anything about a bed—any more than the pigs did. He remembered stealing an old salt bag, into which he used to creep, and sleep, on the earth floor of the negro hut, at his old grandmother’s. She, by the way, had reared twelve children of her own, for the market—all sold and gone from her—and she now blind and alone, if she is alive, and none left with her to bring her a cup of cold water. His own back he said was scarred with the whip—but still he had been a favored slave. He was sent to a slave-breaker, when some 16 or 17 years old—his master not being able to manage him. An attempt at breaking him once brought on a struggle between him and the JockeyCovey, Edward

Edward Covey (1806?-75), who started out as a poor farm-renter from Talbot County, Maryland, managed to accumulate $23,000 in real estate by 1850. Covey's reputation as a slave breaker enabled him to rent or even to receive the free use of field hands from local slaveowners anxious to have their slaves taught proper discipline. Douglass was hired out to him from 1 January to 25 December 1834. Douglass said his first six months with Covey were the worst times he had experienced in slavery. Covey whipped him weekly until Douglass midway through the year fought him to a standstill. Covey's reputation as a slave breaker was apparently “an immense advantage to him.” Harriet Lucretia Anthony, the great granddaughter of Aaron Anthony, remembered that "Mr. Covey was really noted for his cruelty and meanness." His farm never wanted for prime field hands, whom Covey either rented cheaply or got the free use of from slave owners anxious to have their property taught proper discipline. Covey’s favored position in the local labor market may explain why this poor but admittedly hard-working man had managed to accumulate $23,000 in real estate by 1850. Inventory of the Estate of Edward Covey, 15 May 1875, Talbot County Inventories, TNC#3, 578, MdTCH; Douglass, Narrative. 81–109; idem, Bondage and Freedom, 203–50; Harriet Anthony's annotated copy of My Bondage and My Freedom, folder 93, 203, Dodge Collection, MdAA; 1850 U.S. Census, Maryland, Talbot County, 240 (schedule of free inhabitants); Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 117-31. . The result of it was such that

the Jockey did not care to repeat it, while his care for his reputation, as a successful breaker, kept him from getting help to manage a slave boy—and Frederick escaped farther whipping from him afterwards.—After narrating his early life briefly—his schooling—the beginning of the wife of his master’s relative to teach him letters, and the stern forbidding of it, by her husband—which Frederick overheard—how he caught a little teaching here and there from the children in the streets—a fact, he said, which accounted to him for his extraordinary attachment to children—after getting through this, in a somewhat suppressed and hesitating way—interesting all the while for its facts, but dullish in manner—and giving I suspect, no token to the audience of what was coming—though I discerned, at times, symptoms of a brewing storm—he closed his slave narrative, and gradually let out the outraged humanity that was laboring in him, in indignant and terrible speech. It was not what you could describe as oratory or eloquence. It was sterner—darker—deeper than these. It was the volcanic outbreak of human nature long pent up in slavery and at last bursting its imprisonment. It was the storm of insurrection—and I could not but think, as he stalked to and fro on the platform, roused up like the Numidian Lion—how that terrible voice of his would ring through the pine glades of the South, in the day of her visitation—calling the insurgents to battle and striking terror to the hearts of the dismayed and despairing mastery. He reminded me of ToussaintL'Ouverture, François Dominique Toussaint

Born to a literate slave father, François Dominique Toussaint L'Ouverture (c. 1744-1803) was raised near Le Cap in the North Province of St. Domingo, which later became Haiti. Like his father, he learned to read while growing up as a slave on the plantation. When the slaves of St. Domingo revolted, L'Ouverture emerged as a capable military leader, commanding an army of 55,000 men to victory over the combined forces of England, France, and Spain in 1794. This victory guaranteed him the role of leader of the new independent regime in Haiti. In 1802 he was taken prisoner by the French, who had returned to reclaim the island. While awaiting sentencing, L'Ouverture died of pneumonia in April 1803 after enduring ten months of harsh conditions in a French prison. Ralph Korngold, Citizen Toussaint (Boston, 1944); Martin Ros, Night of Fire: The Black Napoleon and the Battle for Haiti (New York, 1994); Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds., Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience (New York, 1999), 904-05. among the plantations of Haiti.—There was great oratory in his speech—what more of dignity and earnestness than what we call eloquence. He was not up as a speaker—performing. He was an insurgent slave taking hold on the right of speech, and charg-

ing on his tyrants the bondage of his race. One of our Editors⁴Possibly the Whig editor of the Concord New Hampshire Statesman and State Journal, who attended the meeting because he wanted to “hear a fugitive slave” but was put off by Douglass's “many cold and reckless statements, such as denouncing every one who would support such a man as Henry ClayClay, Henry

Henry Clay (1777-1852), a native Virginian, entered politics during the 1790s in his adopted state of Kentucky and rose quickly to national prominence. As a congressman, senator, secretary of state, founder of the Whig party, and regular presidential candidate, Clay espoused broadly nationalistic programs designed to avoid sectional antagonism caused by the issue of slavery. He figured prominently in the debates that led to the passage of the Missouri Compromise, and he was a leading architect of the Compromise of 1850. His support of the American Colonization Society earned him the lasting hostility of Garrisonian abolitionists. In Congress, Clay vigorously opposed abolitionist petitions against slavery in the District of Columbia. Robert V. Remini, Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union (New York, 1991); Richard H. Sewell, Ballots for Freedom: Antislavery Politics in the United States, 1837-1860 (New York, 1976), 109; DAB, 4:73-79. for President as thieves, robbers, etc.” New Hampshire Statesman and State Journal, 16 February 1844. ventured to cross his path by a rash remark. He better have run upon a Lion. It was fearful, but magnificent, to see how magnanimously and lion-like the royal fellow tore him to pieces, and left his untouched fragments scattered around him.