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. And 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.
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 torn 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 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 light and healing to
you, has brought stripes and death to me.
This Fourth 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,
towering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty,
burying
that nation in irrevocable ruin! I can to-day take up the plaintive
lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people!
"By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! we wept when
we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst
thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of
us a song; and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing
us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord's song in a
strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget
her cunning.
If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my
mouth."
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 right
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 acknowledgment 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 ciphering,
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 to 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 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 passed.
At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is
needed. O! had I the ability, and could 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 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.
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.
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
corners 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. The iron shoe, and
crippled foot of China must be seen in contrast with nature. Africa
must rise and put on her yet unwoven garment. 'Ethiopia, shall, stretch
out her hand unto God." In the fervent aspirations of William
Lloyd Garrison, I say, and let every heart join in saying it:
God speed the year of jubilee
The wide world o'er!
When from their galling chains set free,
Th' oppress'd shall vilely bend the knee,
And wear the yoke of tyranny
Like brutes no more.
That year will come, and freedom's reign,
To man his plundered rights again
Restore.
God speed the day when human blood
Shall cease to flow!
In every clime be understood,
The claims of human brotherhood,
And each return for evil, good,
Not blow for blow;
That day will come all feuds to end,
And change into a faithful friend
Each foe.
God speed the hour, the glorious hour,
When none on earth
Shall exercise a lordly power,
Nor in a tyrant's presence cower;
But to all manhood's stature tower,
By equal birth!
That hour will come, to each, to all,
And from his Prison-house, to thrall
Go forth.
Until that year, day, hour, arrive,
With head, and heart, and hand I'll strive,
To break the rod, and rend the gyve,
The spoiler of his prey deprive—
So witness Heaven!
And never from my chosen post,
Whate'er the peril or the cost,
Be driven.
