The Great Stain

by Noel Rae

  Not until its rather hasty sanctification as the Civil War drew near, was the idea of the Union as something almost holy generally accepted in the North. The idea of secession, though more popular in the South, also had many supporters in the North. As early as 1845, convinced that the constitution was the great barrier to abolition, and that because of the two-thirds requirement it could never be amended, the American Anti-Slavery Society had adopted the slogan “No Union with Slaveholders!” This was in the wake of the annexation of Texas, in Garrison’s opinion “the greatest crime of the age,” and the occasion for this editorial in The Liberator of January 10, 1845, addressed to the “Tyrants of the world!”

  “Proclaim not to your vassals that the American Union is an experiment in Freedom which, if it fail, will forever demonstrate the necessity of whips for the backs, and chains for the limbs of the people. Know that its subversion is essential in the triumph of justice, the deliverance of the oppressed, the vindication of the Brotherhood of the Race. It was conceived in sin, and brought forth in iniquity; and its career has been marked by unparalleled hypocrisy, by high-handed tyranny, by a bold defiance of the omniscience and omnipotence of God … To say that this Covenant with Death shall not be annulled—that this Agreement with Hell shall continue to stand—that this Refuge of Lies shall not be swept away—is to hurl defiance at the eternal throne, and to give the lie to Him who sits thereon.”

  Therefore—

  “Accursed be the American Union, as a stupendous republican imposture! Accursed be it, as the most frightful despotism, with regard to three millions of the people, ever exercised over any portion of the human family! Accursed be it, as stained with human blood, and supported by human sacrifices! Accursed be it, for the terrible evils it has inflicted on Africa, by burning her villages, ravaging her coast, and kidnapping her children, at an enormous expense of human life, and for a diabolical purpose! Accursed be it for its hypocrisy, its falsehood, its impudence, its lust, its cruelty, its oppression! Accursed be it, from the foundation to the roof, and may there soon not be left one stone upon another that shall not be thrown down! Henceforth, the watchword of every uncompromising abolitionist, of every friend of God and liberty, must be, both in a religious and political sense—No Union With Slaveholders!”

  By then, Garrison had been joined by another outstanding orator. “In the month of August, 1841,” he later wrote, “I attended an anti-slavery convention in Nantucket”—long a Quaker stronghold—“at which it was my happiness to become acquainted with Frederick Douglass.” Since his escape from slavery in Maryland a few years earlier, Douglass had been living in New Bedford, where he worked in the ship-yards and was moderately involved in anti-slavery activities. To reach Nantucket he traveled by steamship and soon after disembarking was buttonholed by William Coffin, a Friend and one of the organizers, who urged him—if moved by the spirit—to “testify.” Douglass did so, though he later claimed that he was so nervous that he spoke haltingly and could “not remember a single connected sentence.” Others, however, were riveted.

  “I shall never forget his first speech at the convention,” wrote Garrison. “The extraordinary emotion it excited in my own mind—the powerful impression it created upon a crowded auditory, completely taken by surprise—the applause which followed from the beginning to the end of his felicitous remarks … There stood one, in physical proportion and stature commanding and exact—in intellect richly endowed—in natural eloquence a prodigy—in soul manifestly ‘created but a little lower than the angels’—yet a slave, aye, a fugitive slave!”

  The moment Douglass finished speaking, Garrison, “filled with hope and admiration, rose and declared that Patrick Henry, of revolutionary fame, never made a speech more eloquent in the cause of liberty than the one we had just listened to from the lips of that hunted fugitive … I reminded the audience of the peril which surrounded this self-emancipated young man at the North—even in Massachusetts, on the soil of the Pilgrim Fathers, among the descendants of revolutionary sires; and I appealed to them, whether they would ever allow him to be carried back into slavery—law or no law, constitution or no constitution. The response was unanimous and in thunder-tones—‘NO!’ ‘Will you succor and protect him as a brother-man—a resident of the old Bay State?’ ‘Yes!’ shouted the whole mass, with an energy so startling that the ruthless tyrants of Mason and Dixon’s line might almost have heard the mighty burst of feeling, and recognized it as the pledge of an invincible determination.”

  To complete the triumph, Douglass was recruited on the spot “to consecrate his time and talents to the promotion of the anti-slavery enterprise” as a paid agent and lecturer, “a powerful impetus” to the cause, wrote Garrison, and “a stunning blow at … northern prejudice against a colored complexion.”

  Over the years, many others were to bear witness to the power of Douglass’ oratory—what a reporter for the Christian Recorder called “the magnetism and melody of his wonderfully elastic voice … No printed sentences can convey any adequate idea of the manner, the tone of voice, the gesticulation, the action, the round, soft, swelling pronunciation with which Frederick Douglass spoke, and which no orator we have ever heard can use with such grace, eloquence and effect.” According to another witness, “flinty hearts were pierced, and cold ones melted by his eloquence.” His physical presence was as impressive as his oratory. “He was more than six feet in height, and his majestic form, as he rose to speak, straight as an arrow, muscular, yet lithe and graceful, his flashing eye, and, more than all, his voice, that rivaled Webster’s in its richness and in the depth and sonorousness of its cadences, made up such an ideal of an orator as the listeners never forgot.” Many years later, Elizabeth Cady Stanton recalled hearing him at a Boston anti-slavery meeting. She had been “spellbound” by his “burning eloquence.” In comparison, “all the other speakers seemed tame,” whereas Douglass had “stood there like an African prince, majestic in his wrath.”

  His skill as a speaker was no accident. When he was about twelve, and still in Baltimore, he “got hold of a book entitled The Columbian Orator [The Columbian Orator: Containing a Variety of Original and Selected Pieces, Together with Rules which are Calculated to Improve Youth and Others in the Ornamental and Useful Art of Eloquence]. Every opportunity I got I used to read this book … These were choice documents to me. I read them over and over again with unabated interest. They gave tongue to interesting thoughts of my own soul which had frequently flashed through my mind, and died away for want of utterance.”

  Among the Columbian Orator’s guidelines was this: “It is not of so much moment what our compositions are, as how they are pronounced; since it is the manner of delivery by which the audience is moved.” A good example of how he “pronounced” his speeches is the one delivered at Rochester in 1852: “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,” more generally known as “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” The speech is very long, even by nineteenth-century standards—only Lincoln seems to have known how to be brief, and that not often—but it was a technical masterpiece, using almost every rhetorical device in the book. For example, although since Nantucket he had been a professional public lecturer for the Anti-Slavery Society, he began with a humble apology for his lack of skill as a speaker: “He who could address this audience without a quailing sensation, has stronger nerves than I have. I do not remember ever to have appeared as a speaker before any assembly more shrinkingly, nor with greater distrust of my ability, than I do this day … The little experience I have had in addressing public meetings”—eleven years!—“avails me nothing on the present occasion.” Perhaps sensing how insincere this might have sounded, he added: “Should I seem at ease, my appearance would much misrepresent me.”

  Next, he reminds his largely white audience of his most important credential: he is an escaped slave, and “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”—Latin
for the introduction to an oration. After a few more disclaimers he gets down to business: “This, for the purpose of this celebration, is the Fourth of July. It is the birth day of your National Independence, and your political freedom. This, to you, is what the Passover was to the emancipated people of God …” One can only imagine the subtly changing emphasis with which, during the lengthy summary of the Revolution that followed, Douglass used the words “you” and “your,” rather than “we” and “our.” At the same time, throughout the history lesson, he kept hinting that the cause of abolition, without once mentioning the word, was much the same as the cause of the Revolution—“to side with the right against the wrong, with the weak against the strong, and 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!”

  But let there be no misunderstanding: “Fellow Citizens, I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men too—great enough to give frame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men. The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration. They were statesmen, patriots, and heroes, and for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory.”

  Having paid his unavoidable dues to the Founders, he moved on—“my business, if I have any here today, is with the present. The accepted time with God and His cause is the ever-living now.” He also changed his tone. “Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I represent to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? … Such is not the state of the case … This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn … Above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are today rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them.”

  And so—“What, to the American slave, is your Fourth 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 denunciation 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 the United States, at this very hour.”

  There was a good deal more—indeed Douglass at this point was only halfway through: bitter sarcasm, harrowing descriptions of the internal slave trade (“in the solitude of my spirit I see clouds of dust raised on the highways of the South; I see the bleeding footsteps; I hear the doleful wail of fettered humanity on the way to the slave markets …”); denunciation of the recently-passed Fugitive Slave Act (“one of the grossest infringements of Christian Liberty, and if the churches and ministers of our country were not stupidly blind, or most wickedly indifferent, they, too, would so regard it …”); denial that the constitution enshrined slavery; and finally, a brighter note: “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.”

  His final words were a quotation from a poem, or at any rate a piece of verse, by William Lloyd Garrison (“God speed the year of jubilee/ The wide world o’er!/ When from the galling chains set free,/ Th’oppressed shall vilely bend the knee,/ And wear the yoke of tyranny/ Like brutes no more!”) Given the popular taste of that time, this was not the anti-climax that it may seem now. It may also have served as a peace-offering to its author, for by the time he gave his July Fourth speech, Douglass, who had earlier called Garrison “the Moses raised up by God to deliver his modern Israel from bondage,” was barely on speaking terms with him. This was in part due to Douglass’ need to strike out on his own—moving to Rochester, founding his own paper, The North Star—as well differences in age, personality and policy. In particular, as he insisted in his Rochester speech, Douglass disagreed with the Garrisonian doctrine that slavery was “guaranteed and sanctioned by the Constitution of the United States.” This, he said, was a “slander” on the Founders; indeed “there is no matter in respect to which the people of the North have allowed themselves to be so ruinously imposed upon as that of the pro-slavery character of the Constitution. In that instrument I hold that there is neither warrant, license, nor sanction of the hateful thing; but interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a glorious liberty document.” Douglass managed to come to this conclusion by insisting that the Declaration of Independence was an integral part of the constitution, in which case slavery could be fought by political action. Also, it must have been almost impossible for a man of such forceful spirit to espouse the meek Garrisonian doctrine of “moral suasion” and passive resistance.

  Six weeks before Douglass gave his Fourth of July speech, this advertisement appeared in the New York Independent:

  UNCLE TOM’S CABIN.

  50,000 COPIES IN EIGHT WEEKS!

  “A SALE unprecedented in the history of book-selling in America. On the 20th of March the first sale was made of the unparalleled book, and in sixty days, 50,000 copies, making

  100,000 Volumes, have been sold.

  “Editors of Newspapers, Magazines, and even the staid Quarterlies, have vied with each other in their eulogistic notices. The ordinary style of book notices has been laid aside, and instead of puffs of half a finger’s length, the press has sent forth column after column—literally hundreds of columns—of stronger and heartier commendations than were ever bestowed upon one book; and with well-nigh one voice, it has been pronounced to be:

  The Greatest Book of its Kind

  ever issued from the American Press. In thrilling delineation of character, and power of description, it is without a rival; and will be read and re-read in every intelligent family in America, and produce an impression never yet made by any similar work.

  “From a thousand notes we cull a line each from a few:

  “We know of no publication which promises to be more effective in the service of a holy but perilous work than this.” Christian Examiner. “A book over which 20,000 families are alternately crying and laughing.” Unitarian Magazine. “The greatest work of its kind which has appeared in half a century.” Providence Mirror. “These volumes will be read South as well as North, and find response in every honest heart.” Albany Spectator. “Will be read by almost everybody.” Puritan Recorder. “We welcome the work as amongst the most powerful agents that human genius has yet produced for the removal of the one fearful curse that rests upon our country.” Christian Register. “We look upon the writing of this book as providential, and as the best missionary God has yet sent into the field.” Congregationalist. (Not reviewed by these worthy publications were the immensely popular “Tom Shows,” which quickly sprang up and added such features as banjo-playing minstrels and slavering bloodhounds pursuing Eliza as she crossed the ice-choked Ohio River.)

  The following year Mrs. Stowe published A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Presenting the Original Facts and Documents upon which the Story is Founded. She makes her purpose clear in her opening lin
es: “At different times, doubt has been expressed whether the representations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin are a fair representation of slavery as it at present exists. This work, more, perhaps, than any other work of fiction that ever was written, has been a collection and arrangement of real incidents—of actions really performed, of words and expressions really uttered.” As well as thoroughly researching her subject, Mrs. Stowe later claimed that she had had a co-author. This was none other than God himself, who had dictated the text which she then wrote down.

  Reaction in the South was twofold. First, there were the “anti-Tom” novels, such as Aunt Phillis’s Cabin, or, Southern Life As It Is by Mary H. Eastman. This included scenes that “would have softened the heart of the sternest hater of Southern institutions.” For example: “It was just sundown, but the servants were all at home after their day’s work, and they too were enjoying the pleasant evening time. Some were seated at the doors of their cabins, others lounging on the grass, all at ease and without care. Many of their comfortable cabins had been recently whitewashed, and were adorned with little gardens in front; over the one nearest the house a multiflora rose was creeping in full bloom. Singularly musical voices were heard at intervals, singing snatches of songs, of a style in which the servants of the South especially delight …”

  Then there were the reviews of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, among them this one from the Southern Literary Messenger, written by George Holmes, a Virginia professor, at the invitation of the editor, John Thompson. “I would have the review as hot as hell fire,” Thompson told him, “blasting and searing the reputation of the vile wretch in petticoats who could write such a volume …” Holmes was happy to oblige.

  He began by adopting the pose of the chivalrous southern cavalier for whom womanhood—or at any rate upper-class white womanhood—was sacred. Thus it was “with peculiar sensations of both reluctance and repugnance” that he approached his task, since the work in question was “the effusion of one of that sex whose natural position entitles them to all forbearance and courtesy, and which, in all ordinary cases, should be shielded from even just severity by that protecting mantle which the name and thought of woman cast over even the erring and offending members of the sex.” The next word had to be—and was—“But …” “But higher interests are involved; the rule that everyone bearing the name and appearance of a lady should receive the delicate gallantry and considerate tenderness which are due to a lady, is not absolutely without exception. If she deliberately steps beyond the hallowed precincts—the enchanted circle—which encompasses her as with the halo of divinity, she has wantonly forfeited her privilege of immunity… We cannot accord the termagant virago or the foul-mouthed hag the same deference that is rightfully due to the maiden purity of untainted innocence.” Nevertheless, he would not “take the critical lash into our hands.” Instead, he would try to forget that the author was a woman and would “concentrate our attention and our reprehension on her book.”