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The Temperance Cause in American and Britain: An Address Delivered in London, England, on 21 May 1846

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THE TEMPERANCE CAUSE IN AMERICA AND BRITAIN: AN ADDRESS DELIVERED IN LONDON, ENGLAND, ON 21 MAY 1846

London National Temperance Chronicle and Recorder, June 1846. Another text in
London Teetotaler or General Temperance Intelligencer, 30 May 1846.

Douglass was among the fifteen lecturers invited to address the fourth anniversary meeting of the National Temperance Society in London on 21 May 1846. The roster of speakers included clergymen, landed gentry, Members of Parliament, and at least one member of the peerage. The Teetotalernoted that Exeter Hall was "nearly filled, the majority of the persons present being of the working classes" and that the audience included "about fifty or sixty of the Military" seated in the center of the hall and "a row of Coal-heavers or Coal-porters" seated in the gallery to the rear of the speaker's platform. The Earl of Arundel and Surrey occupied the chair. The National Temperance Chronicle and Recorder reported that the earl opened the meeting with a few remarks about the number of families who had been "rendered happy" as a result of abstinence. Although Douglass spoke near the end of almost five hours of speeches, his addressseemed to generate great excitement. "The meeting," said the Teetotaler
approvingly, "was well sustained to the last . . . " and "we were glad to

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find so large an audience present, and that the members of the METROPOLITAN TEMPERANCE ASSOCIATION formed so large a portion of that audience."

Mr. Frederick Douglas[s] (formerly a slave in Maryland, from which state he escaped to that of Massachusetts) was received with immense applause. He spoke as follows:—Ladies and gentlemen, I experience great pleasure in having an opportunity of bearing my testimony in favour of the great object which we have gathered this evening to promote. I feel it a pleasure and a privilege to stand on this platform, from causes of which you are probably not aware.
I have only been a short time from the United States of America, and in that country, although there is much liberty in some things, there is very little towards persons of my colour; so that although I have been a teetotaler for the last eight years, I have seldom had the privilege of standing before any white audience to bear my testimony in favour of that glorious cause; not in consequence of my want of devotion to the great principle of temperance—not in consequence of any blot which existed upon my moral, or religious, or even intellectual character, but merely on the score of God's having given me a complexion a little darker than their own—(cries of shame). I rejoice in now having that privilege—(hear, hear); and I think that if my presence here will do no other good, it will have the effect—borne, as it will be on the wings of the press, of rebuking the prejudices of the American slaveholders—(tremendous cheering).

In the United States, although they have opportunities sufficient, of witnessing in the coloured people all those peculiarities which are common to the human family, they seem not yet to have learned the fact so well as you have learned it, that a negro is a man—(immense and universal cheering). I am a teetotaler, and I am so because I would elevate my race from the degradation into which they have been cast by slavery
and other circumstances.
I am pledged against the use of ardent spirits,1Douglass took the temperance pledge from Father Theobald Matthew on 22 October 1845 while visiting him at home in Dublin. Lib., 28 November 1845. because they have the same effect upon a black man that they produce upon a white man,—(laughter and cheers). And I would tell my American brethren from Exeter Hall,2Site of many abolitionist gatherings, London's Exeter Hall was constructed during
1830-31 by J. P. Gandy-Deering as a place for religious meetings and sacred concerts. The 3000-seat structure was a chief center for the "May Meetings" held annually by various British reform groups. The hall was closed in 1907. W. W. Hutchings, London Town Past and Present, 2 vols. (London, 1909), 2 : 604; Henry Benjamin Wheatty, London Past and Present, 2 vols. (London, 1891), 2 : 26.
London, that if I had no other evidence of my perfect

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identity with the human family, than the fact, that these liquors make a black man drunk in common with a white man, it would be sufficient to perpetuate all the pretensions I have ever had to my equal humanity.—(Loud applause.)

I have been for the last seven years warmly engaged in advocating, in the United States of America, the emancipation from physical fetters, of 3,000,000 of my brethren, who there lie crushed beneath the heel of the oppressor. I have been engaged in doing this, and one great obstacle I have met with, has been the fact, that some of the coloured people who have been redeemed from their chains, they have not made a good use of their freedom. I found, therefore, that in seeking to attain the object of my heart—the emancipation of my race from slavery—that I must also labour for the mental, moral, and religious elevation of those who had gained their freedom.—(Hear, hear.)

Many of the coloured people of the United States saw this; many of them set about the work; and although they were excluded from all respectable places and halls where temperance men were assembled, and although they were disheartened and discouraged by the coldness manifested towards them, yet they saw a life, they saw a power in the principle which was being advocated by the total abstinence men, which, if adopted on their part, would raise them to a moral and virtuous eminence, from which they would be enabled to look down upon those who were binding them with chains and fetters!—(Great cheering.) In Philadelphia, Boston, New York, Baltimore, and other large cities, towns, and villages all over the country, they organised Total Abstinence Societies among themselves, giving lectures in their own feeble way; and by these means a deep impression was made upon their northern brethren, particularly in Philadelphia. But they had not only the indifference and the coldness of their white brethren to contend with; not only had they popular prejudice to encounter, but even direct opposition and persecution. (Mr. Douglas[s] here gave at length a relation of the Philadelphia riots in 1842; when a temperance procession of coloured people, on the 1st of August, was broken up and dispersed by a violent and brutal mob, their chapels and temperance halls burnt, and hundreds of men, women, and children driven out of the city where they had to remain

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without shelter.) These are some of the difficulties (continued the speaker) with which the temperance movement among the coloured people had to contend in the United States; many more might be instanced; but I place these facts before you to make the American people feel ashamed of this kind of conduct.—(Loud applause.)

But I must inform you, that these obstacles are about to be taken out of the way of the coloured people of the Northern States; especially are they beginning to be somewhat interested in their education and sobriety. For this I wish to give credit to whom credit is due. There is a large and growing band of determined and inflexible abolitionists in the United States,—(cheers) who are determined that justice shall be given to the down-trodden bondmen. But more strictly as regards temperance, I consider sometimes that I have a right to speak on this question, for I was once fond of a little drop occasionally,—(laughter) and when I have been indulging in this way, I have also felt myself to be some very great man—something like a governor or a president. However, I did not continue long in these practices; and I have been able, by the blessing of God, for the last seven years, to steer entirely clear of them. But, allow me to say, that ever since I came to this country, I have been subject to great temptations;—(hear, hear,) and from quarters from which I ought not to have been thus subjected.—(Hear, hear.)

If in going through the streets of London, I saw a man drunk, so far as his example went it would only serve to disgust me; but when I go into the society of the respectable, of influential, of intellectual and pious men, and see them raise the intoxicating bowl to their lips, then it is that m y strength is tested. Not long since when in Scotland, I was invited to dine with six distinguished ministers of religion. I sat near the side of a venerable gentleman; the conversation was of the most refined and religious character; when at length, as is the custom in Scotland, the whiskey glass was brought on the table. I then found it hard for me to bear my testimony.—(Hear, hear.) Well, the decanters were passed to me: I did not attempt to touch them.—(Cheers.) When they came in front of me they stopped, although a lady at my side expected to see them passed on. All eyes were fixed upon me. The ministering brethren seemed to feel some confusion at my refusing to touch the wine, and said, "Why, are you a teetotaler?" I replied, "I am,"—(great cheering) and added, that at night I had to give a temperance lecture in that town. I don't wish to name the town, for the good reason that there are so very few ministers there, that every one would know to whom I

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refer, and I do not wish to abuse the hospitality which was extended to me by those excellent men.3Douglass undoubtedly refers to his experiences in Perth, of which little else can be learned.—(Loud applause.)

I went to lecture at the meeting that evening, and in reflecting upon the example which had been set me by those learned and wise and reverend gentlemen, I thought I could not do better than call attention to the responsibilities of ministers. I went to the meeting, and I took the ground that all will admit to be a safe and correct one, that he who has it
in his power to prevent the commission of crime, and does not exert that power, is to a considerable extent responsible for the existence of that crime.—(Cheers.) I took the ground which I believe is perfectly tenable, that the pulpit of Scotland and the pulpit of England, (hear, hear,) is to a considerable extent responsible for the existence of the drinking customs of society.—(Immense cheering.) I would not say that they are the drunkard makers, as some hot-headed persons have said; I would not say that one particular class of men are entirely responsible for the existence of intemperance in this country or in any country. But I am here to say, that all drunkenness is traceable to the drinking system of society, and it is against that system that we wage war. We find that Scotland and England are to a considerable extent identified with this system, and as we look upon the ministers of religion, as the embodiment of virtue and piety, and of the loftiest morality, to whom should we apply but to them, for assistance in the temperance cause?—(Loud cheering.)

We never made any progress in the United States until we got the ministers interested. In the state of Massachusetts they are particularly interested, and so great is the demand for temperance on the part of the people, that no minister would be allowed to preach who used intoxicating drinks—(great applause). In many of the western counties of that state, a man, even if he had all the riches of England could not buy enough alcohol to make him drunk—(cheers). They don't sell it in three or four of the western counties. In the town of — ,in the year 1838, you might have seen a drunken man at almost every corner, and now there is not one. In 1844, the jail was entirely filled, and the work-house was entirely filled, and the alms-house was entirely filled; whereas the last reports tell that all these places are almost entirely empty.4Clergymen were unquestionably the mainstays of the temperance cause in Massachusetts. Many prominent ministers supported the short-lived state prohibition law of 1838, although Garrisonians initially preferred moral suasion to legal remedies. In 1840 a local-option liquor licensing system was reinstituted. However, in Boston no licenses to sell spirits were issued between 1841 and 1852, while in 1845 over 100 Massachusetts towns reported no legal liquor sales. According to a report of Douglass's speech in the London Teetotaler or General Temperance Intelligencer, Douglass stated, "In several [Massachusetts] towns a majority of the inhabitants had decided that licenses for the sale of intoxicating drinks should not be granted, so that in many places it was next to impossible to procure drink enough to produce intoxication." As many temperance advocates readily acknowledged, however, figures for the sale of such licenses often reflected a general disregard for the licensing law itself and revealed little about popular drinking habits. Whatever may have been the state of affairs in the western counties of Massachusetts, the port of New Bedford was anything but dry in the mid-1840s. A local citizen's committee reported that over 1600 barrels of liquor valued at $41,000 were brought into the city in 1846, and the amount spent for alcoholic beverages was $75,000, a sum equal to the town's entire tax revenue. Tyler, Freedom's Ferment, 319-21, 325, 337-38, 347; Mabee, Black Freedom, 110; S. H. Lloyd to Rev. Ruben Morey, 14 October 1844, in Lib., 25 October 1844; Daniel Dorchester, The Liquor Problem in All Ages (New York, 1884), 290-91 ; [Robert C. Pitman], Shall We Licence or Shall We Suppress the Liquor Shops of Massachusetts? . . . (Boston, 1868), 22; John Marsh, Temperance Recollections, Labors, Defeats, Triumphs: An Autobiography (New York, 1866), 133-34; Mark Hopkins et al., Address to the People of Massachusetts on the Present Condition and Claims of the Temperance Reformation (Boston, 1846); The Traffic in Strong Drink: An Address to the Inhabitants of New Bedford by the Committee of Citizens Appointed at the Town Meeting Held December 12, 1846 (New Bedford, 1847); George Faber Clark, History of the Temperance Reform in Massachusetts, 1831-1883 (Boston, 1888).
This is in consequence of the glorious temperance movement—(great applause).

Creator

Douglass, Frederick, 1818-1895

Date

1846-05-21

Description

London National Temperance Chronicle and Recorder, June 1846. Another text in London Teetotaler or General Temperance Intelligencer, 30 May 1846.

Publisher

Yale University Press 1979

Type

Speeches

Publication Status

Published