Frederick Douglass

“ Here is a chattel in human shape who on our boasted national principle takes the reins of self-government into his own hands, revolutionizes himself, escapes from a slave state, works three years on the wharves in New Bedford, travels, lectures, writes, speaks in his own great cause, and that of his people, seven years more, and now raises in the sight of the whole nation a journal edited with as much ability as any that can be named. Of scholar, poet or statesman, we care not of whom, nothing in the shape of a weekly journal can be found more instinct with genius and mental power. ”

“ How swarm the foes of liberty and equality! How numerous are their banners, how extended their ranks, how malevolent their purposes! Over what continent, kingdom, people or tribe, do they-not hold mastery? What vigilance and determination, what energy and enterprise, do they not exhibit! What resources, inventions, machinations, are theirs! They rule with a red of iron. Though they cause human blood to flow like water, it does not satiate their appetite; though they have obtained universal conquest, they sigh for another world to subjugate. ”

“ Truth alone is the legitimate antidote of falsehood. Liberty is always sufficient to grapple with tyranny. Free speech, free discussion, peaceful agitation—the foolishness of preaching these, under God, will subvert this giant crime, and send it reeling to its grave, as it smitten by a voice from the throne of God. Slavery exists because it is popular. It will cease to exist when it is made unpopular. Whatever, therefore, tends to make slavery unpopular, tends to its destruction. This every slaveholder knows full well, and hence his opposition to all discussion on the subject. ”

“ Is it true that we should not love and admire those things that are excellent and beautiful? Why, then, did our Creator form us as we are? Why did he give us minds capable of enjoyment? Why does not every sound of music grate upon the ear, instead of being pleasant and harmonious? And why, was the world made a scene of such beauty, grandeur, and sublimity? Above us, in the starry firmament, the discoveries of science show, in all their inexpressible harmony, innumerable suns and systems like our own, ever rolling on in their undeviating course, displaying the wisdom and power of their Creator. ”

“ Is checked by no danger, is stayed by no fear,
Though mighty thy foes are, and urgent thy need,
We charge thee, look upward! we bid thee Godspeed!
On, on! thou brave champion of liberty's cause;
Unfurl Freedom's flag; blot out Tyranny's laws;
"God and the right!" be thy constant war-cry,
Till Oppression's hold ceases, and Slavery die. ”

“ Listen! 'tis the Yankee's hammer forging human fetters out;—
it is indeed a time when the friends of freedom should come together, filled with zeal for the holy cause, and raise a voice of warning and rebuke.
The corrupt political parties are shaking and trembling before the anti-slavery agitation; the time-serving church, with not enough of inherent virtue to be first pure and then peaceable, is vainly seeking for peace which it can never gain in its false and miserable position. If we will but persevere to the end, victory is ours. ”

“ Do you think, young woman, you who cannot endure the presence of a colored man, even on a rail-road car, do you think that the daughter of the slaveholder, (who boasts of her fortune in human flesh,) leaves the social circle—gay companions—the fascinating dance—the midnight revel—to pray and weep with the dying slave?—Like a brute we compel him to live—like a brute he dies! ”

“ I dart down the steep where the lightnings leap,
And the clear blue canopy swiftly sweep;
⁠For dear to me is the revelry
⁠Of a free and fearless Liberty.
I love the land where the mountains stand,
Like the watchtowers high of a patriot band;
For I may not bide, in my glory and pride,
Though the land be never so fair and wide,
⁠Where Luxury reigns o'er voluptuous plains,
⁠And fetters the freeborn soul in chains. ”

“ But, do ever abolitionists think of the life of constant warfare which the anti-slavery lecturer leads? He must be armed, not with the cumbrous and glittering panolpy of the soldier in carnal warfare, but with weapons which it wearies the stoutest champion always to bear. The sword of truth must be ever ready, and, like the knight of old, when entering a conflict from which there could be no retreat, and in which powerful foes were long to be struggled with, its scabbard may well be thrown aside as useless. ”

“ While assembled together to express our sympathy with the slave, and our abhorrence of the system which has reduced him to what he is—a marketable chattel in the eye of the law—we are at the same time, as a nation, supplying the only effectual proof of the system. We are holding in our own hands the key which has shot the bolt upon him in his prison-house; nay, our persons are arrayed in the very fabrics which have been woven from the fruits of the earth, which he is kept a slave to fill by his unpaid labor, and to moisten with his unpitied tears! ”

“ Giving no quarter to slavery at the South, it will hold no truce with oppressors at the North. While it shall boldly advocate emancipation for our enslaved brethren, it will omit no opportunity to gain for the nominally free, complete enfranchisement. Every effort to injure or degrade you or your cause—originating wheresoever, or with whomsoever—shall or find in it a constant, unswerving and inflexible foe. ”

“ Often may the menacing clouds of calumny and hatred threaten to obscure thy beams and dim thy radiance; but shine thou on, unchangingly, in the pure heavens of truth and love. Receive thy light alone from the Eternal Fountain: then will the thousands who have rejoiced in thee, look calmly on the threatening cloud, and await its vanishing, in the firm faith that they shall again behold thee, in renewed beauty and unsullied brightness. So shalt thou be to the mental eye of oppressed millions that which thine antetype in the blue heavens above hath been so long to his outward gaze. ”

“ And not to the slave alone shall thy beams glance hope and confidence; to the warm and faithful hearts that beat so ardently for his well being; to the true champions of freedom who fight her bloodless battles with the sacred weapons of truth and justice—be thou, as the conflict deepens, a cheering, guiding Star. May it be theirs to rejoice in thy beams so long as the warfare rages ”

“ They felt that the Eagle would very admirably typify the spirit of American Liberty. The Eagle steals her prey; America steals her blacks. The eagle will feed upon human flesh; so does America—that is, if the flesh have within it any negro blood. The eagle—that is, the free American Eagle, lays putrid eggs; nought wholesome, nought vital is produced from them. They are foul things, fit for no service. ”

“ Had England existed as a manufacturing nation 2,000 years before, and had the means of reaching India been known, and the riches and capacity of the country understood, raw cotton in any quantity might have been obtained from a soil and a people where cotton had been grown and manufactured for 3,000 years, and whose clothe have been the wonder of the world and the boast of the people by whom they were fabricated. Now behold the revivifying effect of this new branch of English manufacture upon the system of slavery in the United States of America. ”

“ The slave is in the minority, a small minority; the oppressors are an overwhelming majority. The oppressed are three millions; their oppressors are seventeen millions. The one is weak; the other is strong. The one is without arms, without means of concert, and without government; the other possesses every advantage in these respects; and the deadly aim of their million musketry, and loud-mouthed cannon, tells the down-trodden slave, in unmistakeable language, he must be a slave or die. In these circumstances, your committee are called upon to report as to the best means of abolishing slavery. ”

“ Over the wide ocean wave we trace thy first, faint beams; and our hearts beat high with hope and joy. Mayest thou shine, like a gem of purest water, upon the darkened skies of that land from whose hills and fields of virgin greenness the mists of slavery have so long arisen; hanging, like a blank and lowering cloud, where else the light of freedom, intellect and religion would have shone with transcendent lustre. ”

“ In coming to the shores of Africa, we indulged the pleasing hope that we would be permitted to exercise and improve those faculties which impart to man his dignity; to nourish in our hearts the flame of honorable ambition; to cherish and indulge those aspirations which a beneficent Creator had implanted in every human heart; and to evince to all who despise, ridicule and oppress our race, that we possess with them a common nature, are with them susceptible of equal refinement, and capable of equal advancement in all that adorns and dignifies man. ”

“ No message has been sent to Congress which has distinctly denied the object to be the extinction of the nationality of Mexico; and yet, sir, what we disavow will have been accomplished, and what we avowed will have been defeated. This, sir, at least, will be an impeachment of the ability of our government to manage its own affairs. I acknowledge the full amount of glory our army has acquired and shed on the country; but, Mr. President, I am afraid all our applause will be confined to our army. Every nation looks upon us as a hard-hearted people, who are more given to war than modern nations. ”

“ By the blessing of heaven, the Southern planter is enabled to raise the noblest weed that was ever given for the comfort of the human family—a weed, destined to make a new era in modern commerce, if those who raise it have spirit and virtue enough to scorn and defy the banking and speculative quacks of the day. I have no idea that the slave-holding race could maintain their liberty or independence for five years without cotton. It is that which gives us our energy, our enterprise, our intelligence! ”

“ The wonders of creation are above, beneath, and around us. If we look up into the firmament, we behold it peopled with a thousand worlds, which forever proclaim the wisdom and majesty of their Creator. If we look around, we see beneficence everywhere displayed in the beauties of the primrose, the carnation, and the dahlia, which delight the eye, and perfume the air with their fragrance; and the notes of nature's warblers pour upon the ear their sweet songs of happiness, thrilling in each bosom like a delightful dream of paradise. ”

“ We were animated with the hope, that here we should be at liberty to train up our children in the way they should go; to inspire them with the flame of a lofty philanthropy, and to form strong within them the principles of humanity, virtue and religion.
Among the strongest motives to leave our native land—to abandon forever the scenes of our childhood, and to sever the most endeared connexions, was the desire for a retreat where, free from the agitations of fear and molestation, we could, in composure and security, approach in worship the God of our fathers. ”

“ Slavery is no less at war with the material interests of nations, the principles of free-trade, and the teachings of political economy, than with the rights and happiness of its victims. A return to these immutable laws is the road to the abolition of slavery. England is in a position to set the bright example. There is hope for the slave if England will be wise. ”

“ If we convince the world that we are earnestly and resolutely striving for our own advancement, one half the battle will already be won, because well and rightly begun. Our friends will the more willingly help us; our foes will quail because they have lost their best allies—our own inertness, carelessness, strifes, and dependence upon others. And there is no way, except through a press—a national press—that we can tell the world of our position in the path of human progress. ”

“ It is still embodied in laws,—of which the color only is changed. The Blue Laws have given way to the Black Laws—laws as cruel, as absurd, as unnatural, as immoral, as Anti-Christian as anything in the whole circle of the Blue Laws, or as their whole code put together. The Blue Laws were an oppression to man. The Black Laws are an insult to God. The Blue Laws contemplated the texture of a man's soul—the Black Laws that of his skin. ”

“ So full of promise and popularity is this movement, that many of the leaders in church and State are pressing into it; churches which have all along slumbered unmoved over the cruel wrongs and bitter woes of the slave, which have been as deaf as death to every appeal of the fettered bondman for liberty, are at last startled from their heartless stupor by this new cry of Bibles for the Slaves. Ministers of religion and learned Doctors of Divinity, who would not lift a finger to give the stave to himself, are now engaged in the professed work of giving to the Slave the Bible. ”

“ Men can be good to all.—I never yet knew any man so bad, but some have thought him honest, and afforded him love; nor ever any so good, but some have thought him evil, and hated him. Few are so stigmatical as that they are not honest to some; and few, again, are so just as that they seem not to some unequal: either the ignorance, the envy, or the partiality of those that judge, do constitute a various man. Nor can a man in himself always appear alike to all. ”

“ It were quite easy to bring to the support of the foregoing proposition powerful and conclusive illustrations from the history of reform in all ages, and especially in our own. But the palpable truths of the propositions, as well as the familiarity of the facts illustrating them, entirely obviate such a necessity.
Our age is an age of great discoveries; and one of the greatest is that which revealed that this world is to be ruled, shaped and guided by the marvelous might of mind. The human voice must supersede the roar of cannon. ”

“ Education of the intellect, of the will, and of character, is, doubtless, a powerful—perhaps the most powerful means for our advancement; yet a press is needed to keep this very fact before the whole people, in order that all may constantly and unitedly labor in this, the right direction. It may be, that some other means might seem even more effectual than education; even then a press will be the more necessary, inasmuch as it will afford a field in which the relative importance of the various means may be discussed and settled in the hearing of the whole people, and to the profit of all. ”

“ We call then upon the abolitionists of Great Britain, to urge their government to foster and promote, to the extent of its power, the cultivation of cotton in the Indies. By so doing they will promote the interest of their own country—they will confer an incalculable benefit upon ours—they will lift the crushed millions of India from their degradation—and strike off the chains from three millions of American slaves. We confess that one of our main reliances, under God, for the bloodless termination of American slavery, is the increase of cotton cultivation in the peninsula of British India. ”

“ Is it worse to suffer them to perish, where we could save them, than to go forth with sword in hand and slaughter them? Is not this nation engaged in a work little less inhuman and dreadful? Does it hot stand passively and indifferently by on the one hand, while thousands are perishing by its "peculiar institutions?" and is it not actively engaged, on the other hand, in the destruction of fellow beings by slavery, and by a war which riots in the slaughter of Mexican fathers and mothers, and their beautiful daughters? ”

“ Of all the stars is this "brave old, overhanging sky," the North Star is our choice. To thousands now free in the British dominions it has been the Star or Freedom. To millions, now in our boasted land of liberty, it is the Star or Hope. Dark clouds may conceal, but cannot destroy it. Tempests may toss the sea—earthquakes convulse the globe—and storm-bolts shake the sky—it stands as firm as Heaven. Within its meek and twinkling rays, are Faith, Hope and Freedom—cherishing the one, indulging the other, and endeavoring to gain the last for our slavery smitten countrymen. ”

“ The cotton manufacture of England, viewed through the medium of the facts now stated, stands out as the prime inciting cause of untold and unutterable misery and crime. The arm that contributes to the wealth, the strength, and the greatness of our native land, deals death and destruction on a continent on one side of the ocean, and sustains and perpetuates colossal systems of slavery on the other. Whilst spending thousands annually to shield the coast of Africa from the visits of the slave trader, we are furnishing millions to the slaveholders of America. ”