H105, American History I

....The fact is, ladies and gentlemen, the distance between this platform and the slave plantation, from which I escaped, is considerable — and the difficulties to be overcome in getting from the latter to the former, are by no means slight.  That I am here to-day is, to me, a matter of astonishment as well as of gratitude.  You will not, therefore, be surprised, if in what I have to say, I evince no elaborate preparation, nor grace my speech with any high sounding exordium....

This, for the purpose of this celebration, is the Fourth of July.  It is the birthday of your National Independence, and of your political freedom.  This, to you, is what the Passover was to the emancipated people of God.  It carries your minds back to the day, and to the act of your great deliverance; and to the signs, and to the wonders, associated with that act, and that day.  This celebration also marks the beginning of another year of your national life; and reminds you that the Republic of America is now 76 years old.  I am glad, fellow-citizens, that your nation is so young.  Seventy-six years, though a good old age for a man, is but a mere speck in the life of a nation.  Three score years and ten is the allotted time for individual men; but nations number their years by thousands.  According to this fact, you are, even now, only in the beginning of your national career, still lingering in the period of childhood.  I repeat, I am glad this is so.  There is hope in the thought, and hope is much needed, under the dark clouds which lower above the horizon.  The eye of the reformer is met with angry flashes, portending disastrous times; but his heart may well beat lighter at the thought that America is young, and that she is still in the impressible stage of her existence.  May he not hope that high lessons of wisdom, of justice and of truth, will yet give direction to her destiny?  Were the nation older, the patriot’s heart might be sadder, and the reformer’s brow heavier.  Its future might be shrouded in gloom, and the hope of its prophets go out in sorrow.  There is consolation in the thought that America is young....

Fellow-citizens, I shall not presume to dwell at length on the associations that cluster about this day.  The simple story of it is that, 76 years ago, the people of this country were British subjects.  The style and title of your “sovereign people” (in which you now glory) was not then born.  You were under the British Crown .  Your fathers esteemed the English Government as the home government; and England as the fatherland.  This home government, you know, although a considerable distance from your home, did, in the exercise of its parental prerogatives, impose upon its colonial children, such restraints, burdens and limitations, as, in its mature judgment, it deemed wise, right and proper.

But, your fathers, who had not adopted the fashionable idea of this day, of the infallibility of government, and the absolute character of its acts, presumed to differ from the home government in respect to the wisdom and the justice of some of those burdens and restraints.  They went so far in their excitement as to pronounce the measures of government unjust, unreasonable, and oppressive, and altogether such as ought not to be quietly submitted to.  I scarcely need say, fellow-citizens, that my opinion of those measures fully accords with that of your fathers.  Such a declaration of agreement on my part would not be worth much to anybody.  It would, certainly, prove nothing, as to what part I might have taken, had I lived during the great controversy of 1776.  To say now that America was right, and England wrong, is exceedingly easy.  Everybody can say it; the dastard, not less than the noble brave, can flippantly discant on the tyranny of England towards the American Colonies.  It is fashionable to do so; but there was a time when to pronounce against England, and in favor of the cause of the colonies, tried men’s souls.  They who did so were accounted in their day, plotters of mischief, agitators and rebels, dangerous men.  To side with the right, against the wrong, with the weak against the strong, and with the oppressed against the oppressor!  here lies the merit, and the one which, of all others, seems unfashionable in our day.  The cause of liberty may be stabbed by the men who glory in the deeds of your fathers....

Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day?  What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence?  Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us?  and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?

Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions!  Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful.  For who is there so cold, that a nation’s sympathy could not warm him?  Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude, that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits?  Who so stolid and selfish, that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation’s jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been tom from his limbs?  I am not that man.  In a case like that, the dumb might eloquently speak, and the “lame man leap as an hart.”

But, such is not the state of the case.  I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us.  I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary!  Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us.  The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. — The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me.  The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me.  This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine.  You may rejoice, I must mourn.  To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony.  Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day?  If so, there is a parallel to your conduct.  And let me warn you that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation whose crimes, lowering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrecoverable ruin!  I can to-day take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people!....

Fellow-citizens; above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions!  whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them.  If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, “may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!”  To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world.  My subject, then fellow-citizens, is American slavery.  I shall see, this day, and its popular characteristics, from the slave’s point of view.  Standing, there, identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July!  Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting.  America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.  Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitution and the Bible, which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery-the great sin and shame of America!  “I will not equivocate; I will not excuse”; I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be fight and just.

But I fancy I hear some one of my audience say, it is just in this circumstance that you and your brother abolitionists fail to make a favorable impression on the public mind.  Would you argue more, and denounce less, would you persuade more, and rebuke less, your cause would be much more likely to succeed.  But, I submit, where all is plain there is nothing to be argued.  What point in the anti-slavery creed would you have me argue?  On what branch of the subject do the people of this country need light?  Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man?  That point is conceded already.  Nobody doubts it.  The slaveholders themselves acknowledge it in the enactment of laws for their government.  They acknowledge it when they punish disobedience on the part of the slave.  There are seventy-two crimes in the State of Virginia, which, if committed by a black man, (no matter how ignorant he be), subject him to the punishment of death; while only two of the same crimes will subject a white man to the like punishment.  What is this but the acknowledgement that the slave is a moral, intellectual and responsible being?  The manhood of the slave is conceded.  It is admitted in the fact that Southern statute books are covered with enactments forbidding, under severe fines and penalties, the teaching of the slave to read or to write.  When you can point to any such laws, in reference to the beasts of the field, then I may consent to argue the manhood of the slave.  When the dogs in your streets, when the fowls of the air, when the cattle on your hills, when the fish of the sea, and the reptiles that crawl, shall be unable to distinguish the slave from a brute, then will I argue with you that the slave is a man!

For the present, it is enough to affirm the equal manhood of the negro race.  Is it not astonishing that, while we are ploughing, planting and reaping, using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses, constructing bridges, building ships, working in metals of brass, iron, copper, silver and gold; that, while we are reading, writing and cyphering, acting as clerks, merchants and secretaries, having among us lawyers, doctors, ministers, poets, authors, editors, orators and teachers; that, while we are engaged in all manner of enterprises common to other men, digging gold in California, capturing the whale in the Pacific, feeding sheep and cattle on the hill-side, living, moving, acting, thinking, planning, living in families as husbands, wives and children, and, above all, confessing and worshipping the Christian’s God, and looking hopefully for life and immortality beyond the grave, we are called upon to prove that we are men!

Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty?  that he is the rightful owner of his own body?  You have already declared it.  Must I argue the wrongfulness of slavery?  Is that a question for Republicans?  Is it to be settled by the rules of logic and argumentation, as a matter beset with great difficulty, involving a doubtful application of the principle of justice, hard to be understood?  How should I look to-day, in the presence of Americans, dividing, and subdividing a discourse, to show that men have a natural right to freedom?  speaking of it relatively, and positively, negatively, and affirmatively.  To do so, would be to make myself ridiculous, and lo offer an insult to your understanding. — There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.

What, am I to argue that it is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of their liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant of their relations to their fellow men, to beat them with sticks, to flay their flesh with the lash, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock out their teeth, to bum their flesh, to starve them into obedience and submission to their masters?  Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood, and stained with pollution, is wrong?  No!  I will not.  I have better employments for my time and strength, than such arguments would imply.

What, then, remains to be argued?  Is it that slavery is not divine; that God did not establish it; that our doctors of divinity are mistaken?  There is blasphemy in the thought.  That which is inhuman, cannot be divine!  Who can reason on such a proposition?  They that can, may; I cannot.  The time for such argument is past.

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed.  O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke.  For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder.  We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.  The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?  I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.  To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival....

Americans! your republican politics, not less than your republican religion, are flagrantly inconsistent.  You boast of your love of liberty, your superior civilization, and your pure Christianity, while the whole political power of the nation (as embodied in the two great political parties), is solemnly pledged to support and perpetuate the enslavement of three millions of your countrymen.  You hurl your anathemas at the crowned headed tyrants of Russia and Austria, and pride yourselves on your Democratic institutions, while you yourselves consent to be the mere tools and bodyguards of the tyrants of Virginia and Carolina.  You invite to your shores fugitives of oppression from abroad, honor them with banquets, greet them with ovations, cheer them, toast them, salute them, protect them, and pour out your money to them like water; but the fugitives from your own land you advertise, hunt, arrest, shoot and kill.  You glory in your refinement and your universal education; yet you maintain a system as barbarous and dreadful as ever stained the character of a nation — a system begun in avarice, supported in pride, and perpetuated in cruelty.  You shed tears over fallen Hungary, and make the sad story of her wrongs the theme of your poets, statesmen and orators, till your gallant sons are ready to fly to arms to vindicate her cause against her oppressors; but, in regard to the ten thousand wrongs of the American slave, you would enforce the strictest silence, and would hail him as an enemy of the nation who dares to make those wrongs the subject of public discourse!  You are all on fire at the mention of liberty for France or for Ireland; but are as cold as an iceberg at the thought of liberty for the enslaved of America.  You discourse eloquently on the dignity of labor; yet, you sustain a system which, in its very essence, casts a stigma upon labor.  You can bare your bosom to the storm of British artillery to throw off a threepenny tax on tea; and yet wring the last hard-earned farthing from the grasp of the black laborers of your country.  You profess to believe “that, of one blood, God made all nations of men to dwell on the face of all the earth,” and hath commanded all men, everywhere to love one another; yet you notoriously hate, (and glory in your hatred), all men whose skins are not colored like your own.  You declare, before the world, and are understood by the world to declare, that you “hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal; and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; and that, among these are, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”; and yet, you hold securely, in a bondage which, according to your own Thomas Jefferson, “is worse than ages of that which your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose,” a seventh part of the inhabitants of your country.

Fellow-citizens!  I will not enlarge further on your national inconsistencies.  The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretence, and your Christianity as a lie.  It destroys your moral power abroad; it corrupts your politicians at home.  It saps the foundation of religion; it makes your name a hissing, and a by word to a mocking earth.  It is the antagonistic force in your government, the only thing that seriously disturbs and endangers your Union.  It fetters your progress; it is the enemy of improvement, the deadly foe of education; it fosters pride; it breeds insolence; it promotes vice; it shelters crime; it is a curse to the earth that supports it; and yet, you cling to it, as if it were the sheet anchor of all your hopes.  Oh! be warned! be warned! a horrible reptile is coiled up in your nation’s bosom; the venomous creature is nursing at the tender breast of your youthful republic; for the love of God, tear away, and fling from you the hideous monster, and let the weight of twenty millions crush and destroy it forever!....

Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country.  There are forces in operation, which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery.  “The arm of the Lord is not shortened,” and the doom of slavery is certain.  I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope.  While drawing encouragement from the Declaration of Independence, the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions, my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age.  Nations do not now stand in the same relation to each other that they did ages ago.  No nation can now shut itself up from the surrounding world, and trot round in the same old path of its fathers without interference.  The time was when such could be done.  Long established customs of hurtful character could formerly fence themselves in, and do their evil work with social impunity.  Knowledge was then confined and enjoyed by the privileged few, and the multitude walked on in mental darkness.  But a change has now come over the affairs of mankind.  Walled cities and empires have become unfashionable.  The arm of commerce has borne away the gates of the strong city.  Intelligence is penetrating the darkest comers of the globe.  It makes its pathway over and under the sea, as well as on the earth.  Wind, steam, and lightning are its chartered agents.  Oceans no longer divide, but link nations together.  From Boston to London is now a holiday excursion.  Space is comparatively annihilated.  Thoughts expressed on one side of the Atlantic are, distinctly heard on the other.  The far off and almost fabulous Pacific rolls in grandeur at our feet.  The Celestial Empire, the mystery of ages, is being solved.  The fiat of the Almighty, “Let there be Light,” has not yet spent its force.  No abuse, no outrage whether in taste, sport or avarice, can now hide itself from the all-pervading light....