The Slanderous Charge of Negro Inferiority: An Address Delivered in Belfast, Ireland on 11 December 1845
THE SLANDEROUS CHARGE OF NEGRO INFERIORITY: AN ADDRESS DELIVERED IN BELFAST, IRELAND, ON 11 DECEMBER 1845
Belfast Northern Whig, 13 December 1845.
Douglass's speech in the Reverend Samuel Hanna's meetinghouse on the evening of 11 December 1845 was the third of seven public lectures he delivered at the invitation of the Belfast Anti-Slavery Society in the winter of 1845-46. Dr. John Alexander presided. Although the audience was reportedly "large and respectable." the Northern Whig noted the absence of a few patrons who had attended similar gatherings the year before. An unfriendly observer, adopting the pseudonym "Civis," informed the Banner of Ulster that leading Episcopalian and Presbyterian ministers of the city had stayed away from Douglass’s lectures because they disliked the increasing fondness of local abolitionists for stern and uncompromising language. The assembly at the lecture was not so squeamish. The Northern Whig reported that "Mr. Douglass’s address was listened to throughout with deep attention, and evidently afforded much pleasure to his audience." Belfast Banner of Ulster, 19 December 1845.
Mr. Frederick Douglass, in addressing the meeting, said, he felt highly gratified in having the honour of seeing before him so much of the intelligence, worth, and respectability of the town of Belfast. It seldom fell to his lot, since advocating the cause of the liberty of the slave, to have reason to believe that he had so many persons capable of appreciating arguments in favour of the emancipation of the bondman, as he saw before him on the present occasion. (Cheers.) He proposed, that evening, to answer some of the objections that had been urged against Negro emancipation and the Negro race.
Almost the first argument with which the American slaveholder met the foreigner who opposed his institution, or the institution of slavery, was, that the Negro belonged to an inferior race—(hear, hear)—and that he was naturally, intellectually, and morally, incapacitated for the enjoyment of freedom. That was the ground on which the slaveholders based their right to trample on the rights and liberties of three millions of people, in the United States of America, and a large portion of people in other parts of the world. (Hear, hear, and cheers.) Dr. Dewey,1Born in Sheffield, Massachusetts, Orville Dewey (1794-1882) was a graduate of Williams College and Andover Theological Seminary. After a year's ministry in a Congregational Church in Gloucester, Massachusetts, he converted to the Unitarian faith and went to Boston for two years to assist in William Ellery Channing's pulpit. From 1823 to 1848 he held pastorates in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and at the Second Unitarian Church in New York City and received a Doctor of Divinity degree from Harvard College. An avid pamphleteer and frequent contributor to the Christian Examiner, Dewey joined the American Colonization Society at an early date, became a Free Seller, and ardently defended the fugitive slave law before retiring to Sheffield, Massachusetts, in 1862. Douglass here criticizes Dewey’s pamphlet On American Morals and Manners, where he argued that the races were separated by "impassable physical, if not mental barriers." Orville Dewey, On American Morals and Manners (Boston, 1844), 18-21; Eliot, Heralds of a Liberal Faith, 3 : 34-89; Wright, Liberal Christians. 65, 75-78, Douglass criticized Dewey's views in "The Folly of Our Opponents," Liberty Bell (Boston, 1845), 166-72. a Unitarian Minister, being hard pressed by the anti-slavery advocates here, and being stung to shame for the reproach which was cast upon his nation, came home to America, and there wrote a defence of American manners and morals; in which he stated, the Negro race were naturally inferior, morally inferior, and religiously inferior, and unfit to enjoy the inalienable rights of freedom.
He (Mr. Douglass) held, that a series of years of such degradation as the slave had been subjected to, were well calculated to degrade a whole race of people, and destroy that mental elasticity common to the human family. (Hear, hear, and loud cheers.) But he contended, that any other nation, placed in the same circumstances in which the slave had been placed, would shew the same absence of intellect and moral power as did the black race. (Renewed cheering.) And, even if the slaves of the United States could be proved inferior, morally and physically, to other nations, that could be no reason for enslaving them. (Hear, hear.)
If they consulted the words of Divine wisdom, they would see that it was the duty of the strong to support and assist, not to trample underfoot, and cruelly oppress, the weak. But the Americans were so constituted, that they could find a reason in the weakness of the slave, and his
want of information and mental inferiority, for subjecting him to greater hardships than they themselves were obliged to contend with, in the acquirement of knowledge, so that absolutely their own reason was against them. (Cheers)
He did not intend to assert the moral and intellectual equality of the black and the white man, in the relation in which they at present stood towards each other; but he would shew why the black man was inferior—because he was ground down and oppressed, and the means of improvement taken from him. It had always been a convenient pretext for one set of men to oppress another, that they were inferior to them; but did they not feel a loathing, when they saw a heavy-fisted fellow pouncing down upon some weak or insignificant person? (Loud cheers.)
Let them see why the slaves were inferior; and as they looked, let their hearts be made to feel for those down-trodden and oppressed people. (Cheers) The Americans had darkened or bored out their intellectual eyes; and then they asked them, tauntingly, why they did not see? They tied their feet, and asked them why they did not walk? They blunted their moral feelings and perceptions; and then they asked them why they were not as moral, as intellectual, and as religious as themselves? (Cheers) They had done everything that lay in their power to sink them down into the very depths of degradation and misery; and that was the only mode of proceeding, on the part of the slaveholder, by which he could hold his slave.
Slavery could only exist in the presence of ignorance. Education was entirely incompatible with slavery; and, if once the light of science were to come upon the bondman, he would break his chains, and burst from his fetters, and assert for himself manhood and freedom. (Loud cheers.) The slaveholders did everything in their power to darken and degrade the mind of the unfortunate slave. In South Carolina, death was the punishment for the third offence of teaching the slave the letters that spelled the name of his God—Then, was it wonderful that the slave was not intelligent?—that he did not display as much information and intelligence as the white man? Besides, the laws were in favour of keeping the slave ignorant—the entire public sentiment of the country was against learning the slave. His place was to be in the degraded condition of the slave. That was the policy of American independence, American democracy and republicanism. It had assigned the black man there a degraded place—it had said that the black man and the white were incompatible with each other; so that all the energies of the nation might
be said to have been directed towards one point—to destroy and degrade the intellect of the slave.
In the United States, it had been said of them, that they were morally, and in every way, inferior, and their tenderest ties were snapped and torn asunder. Their wages were kept back from them, while they reaped in the field, and the bloody lash applied to their backs; and yet they were asked why they wanted those great and noble qualities of character which belonged to the freeman. (Loud cheers.) The black man was made to feel that he was a slave—his very colour was against him; and, no matter how great might have been his services to the country, or to the Government, his skin placed him in danger of being hurled into interminable bondage; and, if he were not able to prove himself free, he was pronounced a slave—(hear, hear)——his colour was presumptive evidence against him—(Hear, hear, and cheers.) If a coloured man might desire to put his son to a trade, in America, he could not do it—they must be the hewers of wood and the drawers of water.
What was honourable and meritorious, in the white man, was considered criminal in the black man; and, in Virginia, there were no less than seventy-three crimes for which the slave could be hanged by the neck, while there were three only for which the white man could be hanged. (Loud cries of “Shame, shame”) And yet the slave was not allowed to read the law—he was not taught the science of social life—he was not instructed in his moral and religious duties, but consigned by his fellow-man, without cause, to irremediable death. (Hear, hear.) And, what was still more characteristic of Brother Jonathan, many of these crimes, for the commission of which the slave would be put to death, were such as, if a white man did not commit them, he would be called a scoundrel or a coward. (Hear, hear.) If a slave raised an arm in his own defence, he might be smitten dead upon the spot; but the white man was, of course, a scoundrel and a coward, unless he did so. (Hear.) The slave had to meet with the frowns of all with whom he sojourned; and he dragged out a life among them that was hardly entitled to the name of life—one that was hardly worth living for, for all the hope he had was, that he should one day have freedom in the midst of those who had attempted to deprive him of it. (Loud cheers.)
After some further observations, on the cruelty practised towards the slave, in America, Mr. Douglass went on to narrate an anecdote, which strongly illustrated the truth of his remarks, in reference to the general feelings which prevailed among the people of America, on the subject
of the supposed inferiority of the black man—He had been once travelling in America, upon a stage coach, upon which there was a number of gentlemen, with whom he was determined to get into conversation. They did not seem at all disposed to relish this, and looked over their shoulders at him, with a good deal of contempt. (Hear, hear.) There was a discussion going on among them, in which he felt a little interested, and he persevered, as the girl said, "not thinking about nothing at all"—(laughter)—and he found that by and bye, by little and little, their prejudices were giving way, and he was becoming quite a man among them. They reached Bradford, in New Hampshire, and stopped Opposite the house of Mr. Tappan,2Mason Weare Tappan (1817—86) was a convert to antislavery in early manhood, an officialof the New Hampshire Anti-Slavery Society, and a member of the American Anti-Slavery Society until it adopted the piatforn of "No Union with Slaveholders" in 1844. A close confederate of the Free Soiler John P. Hale, Tappan served three terms in the New Hampshire legislature before being elected to the thirty-fourth, thirty-fifth, and thirty-sixth U.S. Congresses on Know Nothing and Republican tickets. A respected lawyer, he is also credited with raising the first regiment which New Hampshire sent into the Civil War. [Mason] Weare Tappan to Garrison, 6, 25 June 1844, in "Lib," 21 June, 5 July 1844; Tappan to [Nathaniel P.] Rogers, 7 October 1844, in "Lib.," 12 December 1844; Stephen G. Abbott, The First Regiment New Hampshire Volunteers in the Great Rebellion (Keene, N.H., 1890) 106-11; Proceedings of the Bradford Centennial Celebration (Bradford, N.H., 1887), 36, 43, 88; Richard H. Sewell, John P. Hale and the Politics of Abolition (Cambridge, Mass, 1965), 156, 158-62: Hutchinson. Story of the Hutchinsons, 2 : 189: BDAC, 1689. the celebrated abolitionist.—(Cheers.) One of the Miss Tappans3Nothing can be learned about Tappan's daughters, not even their names. saw him from the window, and, to the very great surprise of the gentlemen on the coach, beckoned him in. Down he went, and was received by the ladies at the door with the greatest kindness, and all that delightful sort of winning manner, that the ladies know so well how to display. They pressed him to stay, but he was very stately and inexorable on the subject; and, notwithstanding all the persuasion that the ladies used—the gentlemen on the coach seemed as if they would have staid if only the one-half of it had been employed—(laughter)—-—he left them, and got up again upon the coach. At parting, the young ladies gave him a quantity of very nice strawberries, and the astonishment of the gentlemen who were his fellow-passengers was increased, beyond conception. He was now a very great man, indeed. (Laughter.) it was now growing dark, and other gentlemen joined the coach, with whom he and the others fell into conversation. Never, in his life, had he been treated with so much deference and respect; it was nothing but “Sir, Sir, Sir,” he got—(laughter)—and they seemed disposed to consider him as some person quite above the common order.
He wished, at this time, for the sake of the slave, that it was perpetual night in America. (Hear, and cheers.) But when the morning broke, and the sun's rays burst forth, dispelling the darkness, one of the gentlemen beside him happened to observe the crisp of his hair, and he called out to one of his companions, with an expression of utter amazement—“God!——it’s a Nigger! ” (Shouts of laughter.) They were quite horrified that they had been so familiar with a black man; and after that, he sunk very visibly in their estimation. (Cheers) He was not after that treated by them with any consideration.
He would now turn to a brighter side of the picture than that he had been previously dwelling upon. In the year 1839, there was no anti-slavery press in the United States of America, and now there were a hundred journals advocating the emancipation of the slave. In 1829, there was not a man to take up the cause of the oppressed Negro,4Benjamin Lundy (1789-1839) still published his Genius of Universal Emancipation in Baltimore in 1829. Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism: A History of Newspapers in the United States Through 260 Years, 1690 to 1950, Rev. ed. (New York, 1950), 206. or make an effort to absolve him from his chains; but now there were not less than a thousand Anti-Slavery Societies, and one million bold and uncompromising advocates of emancipation. Towards the conclusion of his address, Mr. Douglass took occasion to read a lecture to the Rev. Dr. Chalmers,5Thomas Chalmers (1780-1847), son of a Scots merchant, was an evangelical minister and university professor who tried to combat poverty among residents of his Glasgow parish—a problem he described as “home heathenism”—by using parish lay agents to administer poor relief. A prolific writer with a longstanding interest in social economy, natural science, and moral philosophy, Chalmers is best remembered for his role in the controversy over church self-government and lay patronage that split the established Church of Scotland in the 1840s. Protesting civil interference in Church affairs, Chalmers led the secession in 1843 of the 470 ministers who founded the Free Church of Scotland and elected Chalmers its first moderator. To provide salaries for Free Church clergymen, Chalmers proposed to collect a penny a week from each church member. A deputation from the Free Church visited the United States in 1844 and returned home with approximately £3000 contributed by American slaveholders. When abolitionists urged Chalmers to return this money, Chalmers defended his refusal to excommunicate slaveholders. John Smith, Our Scottish Clergy: Fifty-two Sketches, Biographical, Theological & Critical, Including Clergymen of All Denominations, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1848), l : 149-60; George Shepperson, "The Free Church and American Slavery," Scottish Historical Review, 30 : 126-42 (October 1951); idem, ed., "Notes and Documents: Thomas Chalmers, the Free Church of Scotland, and the South," "JSH," 17 :517-37 (November 1951); William Hanna, ed., Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Thomas Chalmers, D.D., LL.D.," 4 vols. (Edinburgh, 1852), 4 : 581-91; William Ewing, ed., Annals of the Free Church of Scotland, 1843-1900, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1914), 1 : 51-52; Hew Scott, ed., "Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae," 3 vols., new ed., rev. (Edinburgh, 1915-28), 3 : 447, 475; DNB, 3 : 1358-63. who, he said, was an apologist for the horror and persecutions of slavery, inasmuch as he lent his sanction to the system.