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| Frederick Douglass |
The Address of Southern Delegates in Congress to their Constituents; or, the address of John C. Calhoun and Forty Other Thieves
Frederick Douglass
The North Star (vol. II, no. 7)
February 9, 1849
| Frederick
Douglass is almost surely the most well-known American (former) slave.
He taught himself to read and write as a young teenager, and
eventually conducted covert classes in reading while hired out to
William Freeland by his owner, Thomas Auld. He first attempted to
escape bondage from Freeland, but was not successful. In 1838, at
the age of 20, Douglass escaped from Edward Covey, to whom he had been
hired out, and made his way to Philadelphia and then New York.
His escape had the assistence of his future wife, a free black
woman named Anna Murray.
"Douglass" is an adopted family name which they took after
settling in New Bedford, Massachusetts. In 1845 he wrote his
first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Shortly
after this he embarked on a two-year trip to Ireland and Britain.
Upon his return to the United States, in 1847, he began
publishing his first abolitionist newspaper, The North Star,
in Rochestor, New York. This response to Calhoun's Southern
Address appeared only a week after publication of Calhoun's document.
I am indebted to Al Mackey for posting a link to the text on his Student of the Civil War blog. Microfilmed copies of The North Star may be accessed online through most academic libraries; I found my copy through the University of Michigan. |
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| That ponderous cloud of dismal terror which for a time
overhung the national capital, darkening the blue sky of “our
glorious union,” and from which the simple people have only been
allowed to see a few fierce, transient flashes, to keep up gloomy
apprehension and dismay, has at last discharged its thunder and
dissolved. The long-dreaded bolt has reached its maturity and fallen.
Men whole hearts were failing for fear of those things which seemed
to be coming upon the land, rest from their agonizing fears, look
happier, and breathe freer. The apprehended fulmination from the
secret conclave of slaveholders and slave traders, charged with
“accounts terrible, of dire confusion,” and threatening the very
existence of this Republic, turns out to be an old speech of John C.
Calhoun, newly vamped up, and dressed to suit the taste of some forty
other slaveholders besides himself. The alarmed and appalled nation
has at last seen the baseless character of its fears and we presume
will not be so easily alarmed again. The thousand cats in the cellar
are reduced to “our cat and another old black cat.” But lest we should be accused of treating this grave address with too much levity, we shall venture a brief review of it. The subject of the address is called “the most solemn and important ever presented to the consideration of the Southern people.” The subject is summed up in the following ambiguous terms: “We allude to the conflict between two great sections of the Union, growing out of a difference of feeling and opinion in reference to the relation existing between the two races, the European and African, which inhabit the Southern section, and the acts of aggression and encroachment to which it has led.” Just read this statement of the subject over again, and try to understand what is meant by it. The “difference of feeling and opinion” –”relation existing” between two races — “inhabit the Southern section” –”acquisition and encroachment.” Now, the meaning of all this is, the difference of feeling and opinion in the Northern States from the slaveholders in the Southern States. The people of the North, thank Heaven, are becoming more and more deeply impressed with the awful crime of slavery, and are manifesting it, by hesitating to extend its blighting influence to territory now free; and this is the point that gives “solemnity” to the subject. This is the calamity which produces apprehension and alarm. How carefully the above sentences is worded! European and African races, stands for slaveholders and slaves, which inhabit the Southern section. This very soft way of sliding over the hateful word slavery, shows the slaveholder conscious of his hateful crime, and is itself a confession of guilt. The signers of the address say: “We have made it a joint address, because we believe that the magnitude of the subject required that it should assume the most impressive and solemn form.” Poor fellows! How much chagrin must they experience when they witness the mirthful levity produced by their impressive solemnity. A band of forty manstealers solemnly defending their right to plunder their fellow-men of all rights and liberties! An “impressive” scene, which ought to excite as much respect as the union of so many sheepstealers! If ever a body of men were deserving of scorn and contempt, this band of flesh-mongers do deserve it. Their whole proceedings have amounted to less than an admirable farce. The address gives a history of the “difference of feeling and opinion in reference to the relation between the two farces.” Oh! the deceitfulness of sin! This difference disclosed itself in the Convention that framed the Constitution. Would that the difference had been stronger! What the address has to say on the subject of the compromise entered into on the part of the free States with the slave States, every Northern man should ponder well; and draw from it a lesson that will forever preclude him from entering into another like it. It will be seen that the address assumes a clear recognition of slavery in the United States Constitution, by the clause relating to taxation and representation — that relating to the return of fugitive slaves, and that respecting the importation of slaves. We deem it unfortunate for these honorable menstealers, that in no instance have they been able to find a word in either of these clauses which bears the definition of slaves or slavery. The word slave in all these references, is the word of this conclave, and not of the Constitution. — The language in each of the provisions to which the address refers, though doubtless intended to bolster up slavery, and to respect slave property, has been so ambiguously worded as to bear a very different construction; and taken in connection with the preamble of that instrument, the very opposite of the construction given it by this wily band of slaveholders, and they have just reason to apprehend that such a construction may yet be placed upon that instrument as shall prove the downfall of slavery. But granting that the slaveholding construction is the one by which the nation is to be bound and governed, we are glad to see the issue plainly put to Northern men. We say to the slaveholder, Insist upon your right to make Northern men your bloodhounds, to hunt down your slaves, and return them to bondage. We say, let this be insisted upon, the more strenuously the better, as it will the sooner awaken the North to a sense of their responsibility for slavery, not only in the District of Columbia, and in forts, arsenals, and navy-yards, but in the States themselves; and will the sooner see their duty to labor for the removal of slavery from every part of this most unhallowed Union. In any case, nought but slaveholders have anything to fear. The moral sense of the North is becoming restless on this subject. It revolts at the idea of sanctioning slavery, and it must and will seek some mode by which to escape the responsibility of so foul, mean and cruel a system of wrong as is slavery. And it would not be strange if, pressed by the demand for the pound of flesh, they, in turn, should forbid the blood and thus thwart the guilty manstealer of the rewards of the guilty bargain. But we are for admitting that the Constitution is just what these slaveholders in this address say it is; and on conscientious grounds demand the immediate dissolution of the American Union, as required by liberty and the law of the living God. What man will say that the Union ought to exist for a single moment, if under it Northern men are content to act as the bloodhounds of the South, to hunt down, recapture and return to slavery and chains, every brother-man who may be so fortunate as to escape from bondage? Who, who would stain his soul by keeping a bargain so wicked and inhuman as that imposed by these merciless “forty thieves,” in the name of the United States’ Constitution? — The person that would so do, is a traitor to God and man. These slaveholders say in their address, that there is not (in the clause which they allege relates to fugitive slaves) “an uncertain or equivocal word to be found in the whole provision.” This is not true. If the provision in question refers to slaves escaping from slave States into free States, and was intended to define the right of masters to apprehend their slaves, and the duty of free States to deliver them up, the language used, is most ambiguous and inappropriate. — The words “held to service and labor,” for instance, does not necessarily imply the relation of “master and slave,” and is rather a description of minors and apprentices, than of slaves. Then the term “person.” Is not this term in itself equivocal? Are slaves, in law, regarded as persons; or are they regarded as property? and is there not a distinction, broad, deep and wide, between property and persons? If they are property, they cannot be regarded by the law as persons; and if they are regarded both in the light of persons and property, the term is imperfect, equivocal, and inappropriate. In his same clause, the term, “shall be delivered upon claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due,” carries upon its face the appearance of a contract, by which one party has a just claim upon the service and labor of another; whereas, the slaveholder has no just claim upon the labor or service of a slave, and the slave has never and can never make any contract with his master, and can never violate a contract, or owe his master any service or labor. It strikes us that the whole provision is uncertain, equivocal, and carries upon its face no recognition of the right of a slaveholder to recapture his slave; so that while we admit that this clause was intended to apply to fugitive slaves, and to enable their piratical owners to arrest them, and the free States to deliver them up to such claimants, we utterly deny that the clause in question is either clear or explicit. Suppose a man from another country should read that clause of the American Constitution, with no other knowledge of the character of American institutions than what he derived from the reading of that instrument, will any one pretend that the clause in question would be thought to apply to slaves? We think not. Nor would he dream of such an outrage, such a savage monstrosity, on reading any other part of the Constitution. — Blot slavery from existence, and the whole frame-work of the Constitution might remain unchanged. There is, therefore, nothing in the Constitution which means slavery — only slavery — and nothing else than slavery. The fact is, the framers of that cunning instrument were ashamed of the name, while they had not the honesty to renounce the thing, slavery; and it is the same sense of the shame today which leads the friends and defenders of this inhuman system to use the term “peculiar institution,” “the relation subsisting between the European and African races” and the like. It is with a view to hide their great moral deformity from the eye of the world, and to shield slavery from the assaults and bolts which must ever descend upon it, when its gross form is presented to reflecting and humane men. But we pass from this to another point in the address. It is this, the clear and positive testimony it bears to the efficiency of the anti-slavery agitation at the North in undermining and destroying slavery at the South. The old moonshine about putting back the cause of emancipation by agitation, has no countenance in this document. Mr. Calhoun and his “forty thieves” see and clearly comprehend the moral forces now operating against slavery, and is too honest towards his fellow-companions in crime to conceal the danger which besets, or to affect to despise that danger. He is proud, haughty, and bitter, but not defiant. He sees in the systematic agitation — the tracts, pictures, papers, pamphlets, and books — societies, lectures, and petitions, the most efficient means to bring about a state of things which will force the South into emancipation. We thank Mr. Calhoun for this testimony. It is given in circumstances which add materially to its intrinsic value. — It is extorted against pride and precedent , two very strong resisting forces. Heretofore, abolitionists have been spoken of as “fanatics,” “madmen,” altogether a most contemptible body, the only effect of whose efforts would be, to rivet the fetter more closely on the limbs of the slave. That they are not so viewed now, is evident. If mad, there is a “method in their madness,” as alarming to Mr. Calhoun as his “forty thieves,” as that of Hamlet to his murderous and incestuous uncle. Let abolitionists remember this testimony of Mr. Calhoun, and thank God, and take courage in view of the admitted adaptedness of our measures to the accomplishment of our grand and commanding object — the entire abolition of slavery throughout this country — as well in South Carolina as in California. We like the testimony of Mr. Calhoun better than his reasoning. He says: “Slavery is a domestic institution. It belongs to the States, each for itself, to decide whether it shall be established or not; and, if it be established, whether it should be abolished or not. Such being the clear and unquestionable rights of the States, it follows necessarily that it would be a flagrant act of aggression on a State, destructive of its rights, and subversive of its independence, for the federal government, or one or more States, or their people, to undertake to force on it the emancipation of its slaves. But it is a sound maxim in politics, as well as law and morals, that no one has a right to do that indirectly, which he cannot do directly, and it may be added with equal truth, to aid, or abet, or countenance another in doing it.” Better call it Domestic Robbery Institution.
To buy and
sell, to brand and scourge human beings with the heavy lash—-to
rob them of all the just rewards of their labor—-to compel them to
live in ignorance of their relations to God and man — to blot out
the institution of marriage—-to herd men and women together like
the beasts of the field—-to deprive them of the means of learning
to read the name of God-—to destroy their dignity as human beings—-to
record their names on the ledger with horses, sheep and swine—-to feed
them on a peck of corn a-week—-to work them under a
burning sun in the rice-swamp, cotton-field, sugar-plantation, almost
in a state of nudity—-to sunder families for the convenience of
purchasers—-to examine men, women, and children, on the
auction-block as a jockey would examine a horse—-to punish them
for a word, look, or gesture—-to burn their flesh with hot irons—-to
tear their backs with the poisonous claws of a living cat—-to
shoot, stab, and hunt humanity with bloodhounds—-for one class of
men to have exclusive and absolute power over the bodies and souls of
another class of human beings; this, the whole of this infernal
catalogue, is comprehended in the soft and innocent term, “domestic
institution.” This is the established order of things in Carolina;
and Mr. Calhoun and his “forty thieves” would have the same order
of things in California. But now to the doctrine laid down in the
above extract—-It goes the length of denying, on moral grounds,
to any and every person out of the State where slavery exists, the
right of saying, looking, or doing anything, directly or indirectly,
for the overthrow of slavery-—According to this reasoning, it
would be immoral for Northern men to refuse to wear slave-grown
cotton, or to eat slave-grown rice and sugar, since by pursuing such
a course, peradventure they might decrease the value of slaves, and
thereby indirectly affect the permanence of slavery. We are not to
write, speak, or publish anything on the subject of human slavery,
lest it serve to darken the fame of slavery, and lessen it in the
popular estimation, and thereby indirectly destroy slavery, by
exalting liberty. To do so, would necessarily be a flagrant
aggression, a violation of the rights of a State, and subversive of
its government. For what we have no right to do directly by
legislation, we have no right to do indirectly by any other
means.—-This is strange logic for one of the most powerful minds and
renowned
statesmen that America affords. Coming from another quarter, it would
demand no answer or comment; but from such a man, endorsed by such a
company, read so universally, and put forth so imposingly, and
solemnly, aiming as it does, at the very foundation of the
anti-slavery movement, it may be proper to spend a few thoughts upon
it. |
Back to Causes of the Civil War (Main page)h Back to Other Political Speeches and Correspondence Source: The North Star (vol. II, no. 7), February 9, 1849. Date added to website: Shortly after Sept. 28, 2015. |