Southern Slavery and Northern Religion: Two Addresses Delivered in Concord, New Hampshire, on February 11, 1844
SOUTHERN SLAVERY AND NORTHERN RELIGION: TWO ADDRESSES DELIVERED IN CONCORD, NEW HAMPSHIRE, ON 11 FEBRUARY 1844
Concord (N.H.) Herald of Freedom, 16 February 1844.
“Do not despair of New-Hampshire!” Garrison assured Parker Pillsbury 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. Foster was ejected from Concord ’s North Meetinghouse and her South Church 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. Rogers, 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 House. 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,1Betsey Bailey. 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 Jockey.2Probably a pejorative reference to Edward Covey (1806?–75), a poor farm-renter from Talbot County, Maryland, who had “a very high reputation for breaking young slaves.” 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.” 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. Douglass, Narrative. 81–109; idem, Bondage and Freedom, 203–50; Inventory of the estate of Edward Covey, deceased, 15 May 1875, Talbot County Inventories, TNC #3, p. 578, Talbot County Courthouse, Easton, Maryland; U.S. Bureau of Census, 1850, Manuscript Population Schedule, Maryland, Talbot County, St. Michaels District, 240, RG 29, DNA. 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 Toussaint3Francois Dominique Toussaint Louvetture (c.1743–1803) led the island of Saint Domingue, now Haiti, to the brink of independence. In September 1791 Louverture, who had been a privileged slave on the Bréda plantation, joined and helped organize the slave revolts that had erupted in the northern provinces while mulattoes and whites were fighting among themselves to establish the terms of the colony's relation to the revolutionary government in France. Louverture wrested the island from French control, subdued the mulatto forces led by Andre Rigaud in 1800, and forced the Spanish out of Santo Domingo in 1801. Under Louverture’s direction the constitution of 1801 abolished slavery and made him governor-general for life. In 1802 Napoleon dispatched an army, headed by Charles Victor Emmanuel Leclerc, to restore French authority on the island. Though Louverture came to terms with Leclerc, the French general arrested Louverture on charges of treason on 7 June 1802. He was sent to France and jailed in the Fort de Joux, where he died a year later. Thomas O. Ott, The Haitian Revolution, 1789–1804 (Knoxville, Tenn, 1973), 172; H. Pauléus-Sannon, Histoire de Toussaint-Louverture, 3 vols. (Port-au-Prince, 1932–38), 1 : 1–9; Ralph Korngold, Citizen Toussaint (Boston, 1944); Stephen Alexis, Black Liberator: The Life of Toussaint Louverture (New York, 1944); C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. 2d ed., rev. (New York, 1963); James G. Leyburn, The Haitian People (New Haven, 1966), 23–29; George F. Tyson, Jr., ed., Toussaint L'Ouverture (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1973), 121–47. 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 Clay 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.