Slavery Exists Under the Eaves of the American Church: An Address Delivered in Liverpool, England, on 19 October 18469)
SLAVERY EXISTS UNDER THE EAVES OF THE AMERICAN CHURCH: AN ADDRESS DELIVERED IN LIVERPOOL, ENGLAND, ON 19 OCTOBER 1846
Liverpool Mercury, 23 October 1846 (Supplement). Other texts in British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Reporter, set. 2, 1 : 145 (1 September 1846); Liverpool Standard, 20 October 1846; Liverpool Times, 20 October 1846; Liverpool Mail, 24 October 1846; Liverpool Journal, 24 October 1846.
Twenty-five hundred people filled Liverpool’s “spacious and elegant” Concert Hall on the evening of 19 October 1846 when Douglass, Garrison, and Thompson, the “deputation from the Anti-Slavery League,” spoke in the city. Thompson defended Garrison and Douglass against charges leveled by the Reverend Samuel H. Cox during Cox’s recent visit to Liverpool, and credited Douglass with having revived antislavery sentiment in England. The Liverpool Mercury found Douglass’s address “powerful and argumentative.” J. R. Bailey, a black man and a native of a slave state, rose to say that Douglass ’s testimony did not exaggerate the horrors of slavery but revealed “one millionth part of the truth!” After Douglass’s address, George Thompson, Garrison, and Joshua V. Himes, a member of the Evangelical Alliance and native of Boston, offered condemnatory speeches whose targets were the Free Church of Scotland, the Evangelical Alliance, and an anti-Garrison article written by the Reverend John Campbell, editor of the Christian Witness. The Reverend Joseph Clare, a Baptist minister and friend of Garrison, offered a resolution which voiced opposition to the Free Church of Scotland and the Evangelical Alliance. The res-
olution was adopted by a unanimous vote and, after a collection to defray the cost of renting the hall was made, the meeting ended. Liverpool Mercury, 18 October 1846; Glasgow Citizen, 24 October 1846; J. R. Bailey to Editor, 20 October 1846, in Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser, 27 October 1846; Garrison to Lib., 20 October 1846, Garrison to Richard D. Webb, 24 October 1846, Garrison to Elizabeth Pease, 25 October 1846, Garrison to Sarah Hildreth, 4 November 1846, in Merrill and Ruchames, Garrison Letters, 3 : 437–46, 450–51.
Frederick Douglass, who was received with vehement manifestations of applause[, spoke]. He delivered a long, powerful, and argumentative speech, which we regret we cannot give at length. After urging the peculiar rights of the black men and of slaves to speak out against slavery, and detailing some of its blasting influences upon men and society, he said the Americans set out in their charter of national independence, that they held these truths as self-evident—“that all men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
And yet what was the commentary upon that declaration? That three millions of slaves—one-sixth of the entire population of the United States—were that night in chains, in fetters; stripped of their rights; herded together like brutes; without the institution of marriage amongst them; without the Bible, driven from time into eternity in the dark before the biting lash of their tyrannical slave-drivers. And this horrid crime was sanctioned and sanctified, sanctioned by the law, and sanctified by the religion of America. There was no such thing left as a rational heart to which a successful appeal might be made against it. He was, however, disposed to think that the work of abolition in the United States was to be carried on mainly by the people of this country.
He believed that, by speaking to America from this side of the Atlantic, they were doing more good than if they spoke to her in the immediate vicinity of slavery. Were he on his native soil that night he should not be able to meet with the sympathy and support of an audience; he would be mobbed as he had been—mobbed for daring to express his wrongs; for daring to show the scars on his back; for daring to tell them that he had four sisters and a brother still in slavery. For doing this he hadbeen mobbed, beaten, stoned, and had had his right hand broken in Christian America, but in this country he could stand up and state his wrongs, receive the sympathies—(tremendous cheers) of a
British audience; and have his denunciations of American slavery and slaveholders borne across the Atlantic, attended with the shouts of British Christians. (Cheers.)
But let it not be supposed that he was there for the purpose of stirring up anger against the United States. He had never done any such thing. He had always met too lively an indignation in the people of this country against slavery; and his only object was to enlist the Christian, moral, and religious influences of the world against it. It was by such means that he, and those with him, expected to put down slavery in America. They did not seek to put it down by physical force; their instrumentalities were such only as were sanctioned by the doctrines of Christianity, and such only as good men of all countries could commend. The people of America might be able to drive the armies of England from their shores, should they go there; but there was an influence which might be exerted that they could not meet or overthrow—it was the power of truth, the power of love, the power of the pulpit, and the power of the press.
One Englishman standing up thoughtfully on this or the other side of the Atlantic, and proclaiming to the American clergy, and to the American slaveholders, his abhorrence of their crime, would do more to alarm their consciences and to disturb the American people than all the threats of war which might be uttered against them. They could not resist this; they would see the cancer that was eating into their vitals, and that all their vaunted independence was a lie. (Cheers.) They would see that their 4th of July orations were regarded on this side of the Atlantic as downright hypocrisies; they would see that all their pretensions to a love of God, while they hated the slave, was regarded as an absolute profanity; they would see that their boast of sending the Gospel to the heathen, while they withheld it from their slaves, was all marked down here as utter blasphemy. When they saw that they would not be able to lift up their heads among Christian nations, in consequence of the continuance of slavery, then they would abolish it.
If the hypocrisy of the American church was fully known to British Christians, they would as soon think of linking themselves to a pirate ship as to that church. But he would not believe that these men (the American delegates) had succeeded in separating the abolitionists of this country from the abolitionists of the United States, but that the churches of this country were yet prepared to say that they would have no union with slaveholders (Cheers.)
But what was slavery in the United States? He ought to have answered this question before. It was the enforcement of the right of one man in the body and soul of another man. He had known it experi- mentally. In the providence of God he had been able to break his chain, escape from the prison-house, and land on British soil. He was glad to be here, where no hired slavedriver could lash him with a cat-o’-nine-tails, but where he could be free. He felt glad to-night to imbibe British air, particularly as he understood that his master had sworn by his Maker to reduce him again to slavery, if ever he found him in America. This oath reminded him of Mrs. Glass’s celebrated recipe about cooking a hare, when she said—"first catch your hare."1In The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy . . . (London, 1747), 6, Hannah Glasse recommended, “Take your Hare when it is cas’d. ”.
The slaves were not allowed to read, and in Louisiana it was death to teach the slave to spell the name of the Deity. There were seventy-two crimes in the state of Virginia for which a black man was punish- able with death, and there were only two of these for which a white man was punishable with death; and yet of the nature of these laws the negroes were ignorant. A slave might be killed or hanged, and he might be divided into quarters, for striking his master. So many lashes were inflicted for a slave being off his particular plantation. Branding was also employed. He had seen his own cousin, a female, lashed upon the bare back, and while this flogging was being inflicted, the person who lashed her and who was a Methodist class leader, quoted this part of Scripture—“He that knoweth his master’s will, and doeth it not, shall be beaten with many stripes."2Douglass paraphrases Luke 12 : 47. (Cries of “Shame.”)
After describing other punishments which can be inflicted upon slaves, and detailing one or two affecting incidents, he said all denominations in the United States, with a few, and only a few, exceptions, were implicated in this guilt. The Methodist church, through its members and its ministers, held no fewer than 250,000 slaves, the Presbyterians 90,000, the Episcopalians 80,000, and the Baptists 125,000. Indeed they had men sold to build churches, women sold to support missionaries, babes sold to buy Bibles to send to the heathen. The slaves’ prison and the church stand in the same street—the gates of heaven and the gates of hell being in the same avenue. The pulpit and the auctioneer’s block are in the same neighbourhood, and the blood-stained gold, received for the sale of human flesh on the auction block,
goes to support the pulpit, while the pulpit, in return, governs the infernal business with the garb of Christianity. (Applause)
Under the drippings of the American sanctuary slavery has its existence. Whips, chains, gags, blood-hounds, thumb-screws, and all the bloody paraphernalia of slavery lie right under the drippings of the sanctuary, and instead of being corroded and rusted by its influence, they are kept in a state of preservation. Ministers of religion defend slavery from the Bible—ministers of religion own any number of slaves—bishops trade in human flesh—churches may be said to be literally built up in human skulls, and their very walls cemented with human blood—women are sold at the public block to support a minister, to support a church—human beings sold to buy sacramental services, and all, of course, with the sanction of the religion of the land. It was with such religionists as these that the Evangelical Alliance would have the Christians of this country link and interlink themselves. (Applause) A multitude of resolutions could be read, showing the support given to slavery by the churches of America. (A coloured man here got up in the audience and corroborated the statements of the speaker.)3This was J. R. Bailey. Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser, 27 October 1846.
He could not misrepresent, he could not exaggerate the state of things in America. He would give them a specimen of the religious teaching of these men to their slaves, and for this purpose he begged to be permitted to preach them a sermon ,—a slave-holder’s sermon. He wished also to use the canting tones of the minister, for even these slave holding divines affected a pious whine in their sermons and gave them with a sanctimonious air. He had listened to them, and if their preaching was calculated to do any good at all, of course he had had the benefit of their teaching. They had only one text: there were only two texts in the Bible that suited them. They did not like the present translation at all. He should not wonder if they got out another translation, more in accordance with their views of the original. (Laughter)
The text was, “Servants, obey your masters;”4Douglass paraphrases Eph. 6 : 5 or Col. 3 : 22 or Titus 2 : 9 assuming, of course, that the term servant meant slave in every case. “Servants, obey your masters,” says the pious man. “You should obey your masters, in the first place, because the Lord hath commanded you to be obedient. Now, servants, to the Christian this would be all-sufficient: but there are those among you who, I am sorry to say, know nothing of the influence
of Divine grace in the soul. I will address a word, however, to those who have received this grace. I know your prayer is daily, ‘Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?’5Acts 9 : 6. The answer to that is given in the text, ‘Obey your masters.’ (Loud applause.)
“You should obey your masters, in the second place, because your own happiness so depends on your obedience. Now, servants, such is the relation between cause and effect, and so intimately connected with human happiness is obedience, that there can be no happiness on the earth through any other medium than obedience—obedience: and wherever you see wretchedness, wherever you see misery, poverty, want, and distress, we may point you to that as all the result of disobedience. (Laughter.)
“Allow me to illustrate this by stating a fact. Sam was sent the other day to perform a certain amount of labour, which ought to have taken him the short space of two hours and a half. His master—and, by the way, his master was a pious soul—after having waited long after the expiration of the time, went to the place where Sam should have been at work. When he got there, lo and behold! there lay Sam’s hoe, and Sam was lying fast asleep in a comer of the place. (Laughter.) Think of the feelings of that pious master! His commands disobeyed, his work not done, his authority thrown off. The good man went to look at the law and the testimony, to know his duty on the premises, and there he was instructed that ‘he that knoweth his master’s will and doeth it not, shall be beaten with many stripes.” Sam was therefore taken up and lashed, so as not to be able to work for a week. Oh, then, if you would not be whipped, be very obedient to your master. (Applause)
“Thirdly,—You should obey your masters in the third place, because of a sense of gratitude which you should experience in consequence of the fact that the Lord in his mercy brought you from Africa to this Christian country. (Laughter and applause.) Oh, servants, this is an important consideration. Let us take a view of Africa. Africa, degraded, lost, and ruined Africa. There are no sanctuaries there; no Gospel privileges there. Men are groping their way in the blindness of heathenism, without God, and without hope; and the Lord seeing you in this wretched state, put it into the hearts of good men—of pious men, to leave their homes and their families, that they might snatch you as brands from the burning, and bring you into this Christian country. (Applause.)
How happy are your ears,
That hear the Gospel sound,
Which prophets and kings desired long,
And sought, but never found.
“Fourthly,—You ought to obey your masters in the fourth place, because of your adaptation to your condition. Now, servants, this is a very important consideration. In all relations that God has established, this mark of its wisdom is always manifest. Adaptation, adaptance, adaptability of things to their places. You have hard hands, strong frames, robust constitutions, and black skins. Your masters and mistresses have soft hands, long slender fingers, delicate constitutions, and white skins. Now, servants, let me put to you a question. Whence these differences? ‘It is the Lord’s doing, and marvellous in our eyes.’6Douglass paraphrases Ps. 118 : 23 or Matt. 21 : 42 or Mark 12 : 11. (Applause and laughter.) Thus, then, you see that you are most able to do the work, to labour and toil. You have superior strength to your masters. But, oh! servants, as a minister of the Gospel, let me exhort you not to boast of your strength—boast not of your strength, for that was given unto you in lieu of something else. And recollect your relation to your masters does not place you in the light of benefactors, for while you are dispensing blessings on them, they are returning blessings on you. You have not so much intellect as your masters. You could not think whether such things are a benefit to you or not. You could not take care of yourselves. Your masters have the best reason and intellect. They can provide and take care of you; Oh! blessed is God, in providing one class of men to do the work, and the other to think.” (Laughter and applause.) The above being delivered with a canting whine and air was quite irresistible, and it told with great effect upon the audience.
The speaker next read extracts from two sermons by Bishop Meade, intended to be read by slaveholders to their slaves, with the view of showing that this sermon was no exaggerated picture.7Douglass probably read from Meade, Sermons Addressed to Masters and Servants.The monstrous propositions in Bishop Meade’s sermons excited the disgust of the audience, and they were ably handled and demolished by the speaker. He said it was because Mr. Garrison had denounced the religion of Bishop Meade he had been designated an infidel, but it was the grossest of all frauds and libels to call such a religion as this Christianity. To advocate such a religion as this was to war with that religion which is first pure,
then peaceable; and by all the love he bore to Christianity, he was bound to denounce the slaveholding religion of America, and the man who would advocate it was at war with God. Dr. Cox applied for a slaveholder to become a member of the Alliance, and he was refused whereat the Doctor said that the exclusion of that man would wound the heart of many in America.8Samuel Hanson Cox, in a speech before the Evangelical Alliance, stated: “I cannot conclude without adverting to the case of Mr. Gordon. He is a Presbyterian Minister, and lives in Kentucky ,—a Slave State. . . . [H]e has, I will say, the misfortune of standing in the law-relation of a slaveholder to nine human beings. . . . He has been watching at your doors, but he could not be admitted. I brought his name before the Nomination Committee, but in vain; and he has gone home. . . . He is a man of piety and kindness, and he urged me not to press his request: but he has gone home with that wound. We have to meet that in America.” Evangelical Alliance, Proceedings, 1846, 416–17.
It was to be expected that those who had allied themselves to the slaveholder would array themselves against the slave and the abolitionist. He acknowledged that he was an infidel to the slaveholding religion of America. He knew he would awake the ire of Dr. Cox and the American churches; but he cared not. He should go through England, Ireland, and Scotland, again to startle the slaveholders of America. People needed information on this subject. They required to know something of Dr. Cox and the other members of the American deputation. They required also to know something of American professions. Americans professed to be anxious for the cause of Christ; but thrice had the Bible Society refused to give the Bible to the slaves in the Southern States, and, therefore, they were hypocrites.9Probably a reference to the American Bible Society ’s longstanding reluctance to include slaves in its program of distributing free Bibles to every family in the United States, though it did intimate at various times its readiness to reverse this policy. Only twice before 1846, however, did the Society actually spum requests to furnish Bibles to the slaves. The first time was in 1834 when a committee from the American Anti-Slavery Society proposed that the American Bible Society “raise the sum of $20,000, for the purpose of supplying every colored family in the United States with a Bible,” the abolitionists pledging $5,000 of that amount. The only condition was that the program had to be carried into effect in two years. Aware that state law forbade slaves to read, the New York managers of the Bible Society refused to have anything to do with the request, explaining that it was the responsibility of the local societies alone to decide to whom Bibles should be distributed. The American Anti-Slavery Society renewed its request the following year, but the American Bible Society ignored it. Lib., 28 November 1835; 13 February 1836; American Anti-Slavery Society, First Annual Report, 33–34; American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, Shall We Give Bibles to Three Millions of American Slaves? [n.p., n.d.]; Goodell, Slavery and Anti-Slavery, 210–12; Garrison and Garrison, Garrison Life, 1 : 478. He did not mean to say there were no Christians in America; but who were they? They were those who were labouring to make the slave go free.
They professed a great deal in America. Every Sunday some 10,000
pulpits belched forth a simultaneous lie, “O Lord, we thank thee that we live in a land of civil and religious liberty.” There was not a word of truth in it. Three millions of slaves still in bondage. A land of civil and religious liberty! Three millions of souls, and not a Bible! A land of civil and religious liberty! Three millions denied the privilege of marriage! A land of civil and religious liberty! Three millions exposed on the auction-block to be sold like brutes. A land of civil and religious liberty! Three millions of people stripped of every right and denied every privilege. A land of civil and religious liberty!—where, for a man to lift up his voice in bold denunciation of slavery was to expose himself to death in thirteen states of the American Union. Was this a land of civil and religious liberty? (The speaker resumed his seat amidst the most vehement applause.)