The Heroic Slave

by Frederick Douglass

  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 burn 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 employment 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. Oh! 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 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 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 every-day practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.

  1. Isaiah 35:6; a hart is a male red deer.

  2. Psalms 137:1–6.

  3. From “To the Public,” an editorial by William Lloyd Garrison in the inaugural issue of his antislavery newspaper the Liberator (1 January 1831).

  FREDERICK DOUGLASS

  from “West India Emancipation”

  Abolitionists traditionally celebrated the 1 August 1834 emancipation of British West Indian slaves with gatherings that included songs and orations. Douglass gave his speech “West India Emancipation” on 3 August 1857 before approximately one thousand people, predominately African Americans, at an amphitheater in the Ontario County Agricultural Society fairgrounds in Canandaigua, New York. The speech was published shortly thereafter in a pamphlet, Two Speeches, by Frederick Douglass; One on West India Emancipation, Delivered at Canandaigua, August 4th, and the Other on the Dred Scott Decision, Delivered in New York on the Occasion of the Anniversary of the American Abolition Society, May, 1857 (Rochester, N.Y., 1857), the source of the excerpt below. (The 4 August date in the title is incorrect.) Typically, West Indian emancipation speeches praised British leaders for their enlightened action and called on U.S. leaders to follow their example. But Douglass shifts the emphasis in this speech, crediting the blacks of the West Indies with bringing about their own emancipation through their use of violent resistance. By invoking Madison Washington and other black rebels, Douglass calls on blacks to continue to exert similar pressure in the United States.

  Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.

  This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. In the light of these ideas, Negroes will be hunted at the North, and held and flogged at the South so long as they submit to those devilish outrages, and make no resistance, either moral or physical. Men may not get all they pay for in this world, but they must certainly pay for all they get. If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others.

  Hence, my friends, every mother who, like Margaret Garner, plunges a knife into the bosom of her infant to save it from the hell of our Christian Slavery, should be held and honored as a benefactress.1 Every fugitive from slavery who like the noble William Thomas at Wilkesbarre, prefers to perish in a river made red by his own blood, to submission to the hell hounds who were hunting and shooting him, should be esteemed as a glorious martyr, worthy to be held in grateful memory by our people.2 The fugitive Horace, at Mechanicsburgh, Ohio, the other day, who taught the slave catchers from Kentucky that it was safer to arrest white men than to arrest him, did a most excellent service to our cause.3 Parker and his noble band of fifteen at Christiana, who defended themselves from the kidnappers with prayers and pistols, are entitled to the honor of making the first successful resistance to the Fugitive Slave Bill.4 But for that resistance, and the rescue of Jerry, and Shadrack, the man-hunters would have hunted our hills and valleys here with the same freedom with which they now hunt their own dismal swamps.5

  There was an important lesson in the conduct of that noble Krooman in New York, the other day, who, supposing that the American Christians were about to enslave him, betook himself to the mast head, and with knife in hand, said he would cut his throat before he would be made a slave.6 Joseph Cinque on the deck of the Amistad, did that which should make his name dear to us.7 He bore nature’s burning protest against slavery. Madison Washington who struck down his oppressor on the deck of the Creole, is more worthy to be remembered than the colored man who shot Pitcaren at Bunker Hill.8

  My friends, you will observe that I have taken a wide range, and you think it is about time that I should answer the special objection to this celebration. I think so too. This, then, is the truth concerning the inauguration of freedom in the British West Indies. Abolition was the act of the British Government. The motive which led the Government to act, no doubt was mainly a philanthropic one, entitled to our highest admiration and gratitude. The National Religion, the justice, and humanity, cried out in thunderous indignation against the foul abomination, and the government yielded to the storm. Nevertheless a share of the credit of the result falls justly to the slaves themselves. “Though slaves, they were rebellious slaves.” They bore themselves well. They did not hug their chains, but according to their opportunities, swelled the general protest against oppression. What Wilberforce9 was endeavoring to win from the Bri
tish Senate by his magic eloquence, the Slaves themselves were endeavoring to gain by outbreaks and violence. The combined action of one and the other wrought out the final result. While one showed that slavery was wrong, the other showed that it was dangerous as well as wrong. Mr. Wilberforce, peace man though he was, and a model of piety, availed himself of this element to strengthen his case before the British Parliament, and warned the British government of the danger of continuing slavery in the West Indies. There is no doubt that the fear of the consequences, acting with a sense of the moral evil of slavery led to its abolition. The spirit of freedom was abroad in the Islands. Insurrection for freedom kept the planters in a constant state of alarm and trepidation. A standing army was necessary to keep the slaves in their chains. This state of facts could not be without weight in deciding the question of freedom in these countries.

  I am aware that the rebellious disposition of the slaves was said to arise out of the discussions which the abolitionists were carrying on at home, and it is not necessary to refute this alleged explanation. All that I contend for is this: that the slaves of the West Indies did fight for their freedom, and that the fact of their discontent was known in England, and that it assisted in bringing about that state of public opinion which finally resulted in their emancipation. And if this be true, the objection is answered.

  Again, I am aware that the insurrectionary movements of the slaves were held by many to be prejudicial to their cause. This is said now of such movements at the South. The answer is that abolition followed close on the heels of insurrection in the West Indies, and Virginia was never nearer emancipation than when General Turner10 kindled the fires of insurrection at Southampton.

  Sir, I have now more than filled up the measure of my time. I thank you for the patient attention given to what I have had to say. I have aimed, as I said at the beginning, to express a few thoughts having some relation to the great interests of freedom both in this country and in the British West Indies, and I have said all that I meant to say, and the time will not permit me to say more.

  1. Margaret Garner (c. 1833–1861) was a Kentucky slave who fled to Ohio with her family in 1856, and then attempted to kill her four children when she was trapped by fugitive slave hunters. She killed one daughter with a butcher knife. After a trial in Ohio, she was sent back into slavery, and in 1861 she died in a steamship collision. The case helped to inspire Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987).

  2. The fugitive slave William Thomas was working as a waiter at a hotel in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, when he was confronted by fugitive slave hunters. Initially, he jumped into the Susquehanna River, declaring that he would rather drown than be remanded into slavery. Aided by Wilkes-Barre citizens, he made his escape.

  3. Probably a reference to a fugitive slave named Addison White, who had taken refuge in Mechanicsburg, Ohio. On 21 May 1857, several months before Douglass gave this speech, seven men from Kentucky, including two U.S. deputy marshals, attempted to arrest White, who escaped with the help of a local farmer. The farmer, Udney Hyde, was initially arrested by the marshals but then freed by a local court.

  4. The Fugitive Slave Act, which was part of the Compromise of 1850, made it illegal to assist or harbor fugitive slaves. In September 1851, the Maryland slave owner Edward Gorsuch attempted to capture two of his slaves who had taken refuge at the home of William Parker in Christiana, Pennsylvania, which was a predominately black community. Parker, a former slave, along with some of his neighbors, fought back against Gorsuch and the white men who had accompanied him, killing Gorsuch. Parker then took flight to Rochester, where he met Douglass, who helped him on his way to Canada.

  5. Douglass refers to two famous fugitive slave cases. On 1 October 1851, in Syracuse, New York, abolitionists freed a runaway slave from Missouri known as Jerry and helped him reach the safety of Canada; and on 15 February 1851, a runaway slave from Virginia known as Shadrach was captured in Boston and then freed by blacks who crowded into the courthouse. Like Jerry, Shadrach successfully made his way to Canada.

  6. In a widely reported incident just two weeks before Douglass gave his West Indian emancipation speech, a native African, supposedly of the Krooman tribe, became so fearful that he was going to be remanded into slavery that he climbed the rigging of the ship, stating that he would rather die than become a slave. He was eventually coaxed down. His subsequent history, and reasons for being on the ship in the first place, remains obscure.

  7. On Cinqué and the Amistad, see “A Priceless Picture,” in part 4.

  8. Black tradition maintained that the emancipated slave Peter Salem (1750–1816) killed the British major John Pitcairn (1722–1775) at the Battle of Bunker Hill on 17 June 1775. See William C. Nell, The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (Boston, 1855).

  9. The British politician and reformer William Wilberforce (1759–1833) had an important role in the public campaigns and debates in Parliament that led to the abolition of slavery in the British Empire.

  10. Nat Turner.

  FREDERICK DOUGLASS

  “A Black Hero”

  Three months after the outbreak of the Civil War, and at a time when Douglass was urging Lincoln and other northern leaders to conceive of it as a war of emancipation, he learned of the amazing rebellion at sea led almost single-handedly by the twenty-seven-year-old free black William Tillman. Tillman was the steward and cook on the Long Island–based schooner S. J. Waring, which was seized on its way to Uruguay by the Jeff Davis, a privately owned ship with a crew authorized by the Confederacy to attack northern ships and positions. On the night of 16 July 1861, Tillman killed several of the privateers, gained control of the S. J. Waring, and guided it back to New York Harbor, where he was greeted as a hero. Two weeks later, the popular Harper’s Weekly ran an article about the revolt, including several illustrations of Tillman (see figure 5). For Douglass, Tillman exhibited virtues shared by Madison Washington and other black rebels he admired. Tillman’s bravery and military skills led Douglass to redouble his efforts to convince Lincoln to recruit African Americans for the Union army. “A Black Hero” appeared in the August 1861 issue of Douglass’s Monthly, the source of the text below.

  While our Government still refuses to acknowledge the just claims of the negro, and takes all possible pains to assure ‘our Southern brethren’ that it does not intend to interfere in any way with this kind of property; while the assistance of colored citizens in suppressing the slaveholders’ rebellion is peremptorily and insultingly declined; while even Republicans still deny and reject their natural allies and unite with pro-slavery Democrats in recognizing their alleged inferiority—it has happened that one of the most daring and heroic deeds—one which will be likely to inflict the heaviest blow upon the piratical enterprizes of JEFF. DAVIS1—has been struck by an obscure negro. All know the story of this achievement: The schooner ‘S.J. Waring,’ bound to Montevideo,2 having on board a valuable cargo, when, scarcely beyond the waters of New York, was captured by the privateer ‘Jeff. Davis.’ The captain and the mate of the Waring were sent home, and a prize crew, consisting of five men, were put on board of her. Three of the original crew, two seamen and WILLIAM TILLMAN, the colored steward, besides a passenger, were retained. TILLMAN, our hero, very soon ascertained from conversations which he was not intended to hear, that the vessel was to be taken to Charleston, and that he himself was to be sold as a slave. The pirates had chuckled over their last item of their good luck; but, unfortunately for them, they had a man to deal with, one whose brave heart and nerves of steel stood athwart their infernal purposes.

  5. “The Attack on the Second Mate,” engraving of William Tillman, Harper’s Weekly, 3 August 1861. Widener Library, Harvard University.

  TILLMAN took an early occasion to make known to his fellow prisoners the devilish purpose of the pirates, and declared that they should never succeed in getting him to Charleston alive. Only one of his fellow prisoners, a German named STEDDING, consented to take part in the dangerous task of recaptur
ing the vessel. He watched anxiously for a favorable moment to slay the pirates and gain his freedom. So vigilant, however, were the prize captain and crew, that it was not until they had nearly reached the waters of Charleston, in the very jaws of a fate which he dreaded more than death, that an opportunity offered. They were within fifty miles of Charleston; night and sleep had come down upon them—for even pirates have to sleep. STEDDING, the German, discovered that NOW was the time, and passing the word to TILLMAN, the latter began his fearful work—killing the pirate captain, mate and second mate, and thus making himself master of the ship with no other weapon than a common hatchet, and doing his work so well that the whole was accomplished in seven minutes, including the giving the bodies of the pirates to the sharks. The other two men were secured, but afterwards released on condition that they would help to work the ship back to New York. Here was a grand difficulty, even after the essential had been accomplished, one before which a man less hopeful and brave than TILLMAN would have faltered. Neither himself nor his companions possessed any knowledge of navigation, and they might have fallen upon shores quite as unfriendly as those from which they were escaping, or they might have been overtaken by pirates as savage as those whose bodies they had given to the waves. But, despite of possible shipwreck and death, they managed safely to reach New York, TILLMAN humorously remarking that he came home as captain of the vessel in which he went out as steward.

  When we consider all the circumstances of this transaction, we cannot fail to perceive in TILLMAN a degree of personal valor and presence of mind equal to those displayed by the boldest deeds recorded in history. The soldier who marches to the battle field with all inspirations of numbers, music, popular applause, ‘the pomp and circumstance of glorious war,’3 is brave; but he who, like TILLMAN, has no one to share danger with him, in whose surroundings there is nothing to steel his arm or fire his heart, who has to draw from his own bosom the stern confidence required for the performance of the task of man-slaying, is braver. The soldier knows that even in case of defeat there are stronger probabilities in his favor than against him. TILLMAN, on the other side, was almost alone against five, and well knew that if he failed, an excruciating death would be the consequence. He was on the perilous ocean, at the mercy of the winds and waves, with whose powers he was as well acquainted as he was conscious of his inability by skill and knowledge to defy them. How much nerve, moreover, does it not require in a man unaccustomed to bloodshed, a stranger to the sights and scenes of the battle field, to strike thus for liberty! TILLMAN is described as anything but a sanguinary man. His whole conduct in sparing the lives of part of the pirate crew proves that the description of his good-natured and gentle disposition is no exaggeration of his virtues. Love of liberty alone inspired him and supported him, as it had inspired DENMARK VESEY, NATHANIEL TURNER, MADISON WASHINGTON, TOUSSAINT L’OUVERTURE, SHIELDS GREEN, COPELAND,4 and other negro heroes before him, and he walked to his work of self-deliverance with a step as firm and dauntless as the noblest Roman of them all.5 Well done for TILLMAN! The N. Y. Tribune well says of him, that the nation is indebted to him for the first vindication of its honor on the sea. When will this nation cease to disparage the negro race? When will they become sensible of the force of this irresistible TILLMAN argument?