Reception Soiree to Mr. Frederick Douglass

Extract Last night, in the City Hall, a reception soiree was given to Mr. Frederick Douglass, a gentleman of colour, who has recently arrived in this country from the United States, and is alleged to have been implicated in the outbreak at Harper’s Ferry. The hall was nearly filled … Mr. DOUGLASS, on rising, was received with loud and renewed applause. His address was, to a great extent, a repetition of the lecture which he delivered in Paisley, and which appeared in our impression of Saturday. In addition, Mr. Douglass, when speaking of the outbreak at Harper’s Ferry, said that John Brown’s object was to free the slaves of Virginia and Maryland. His purpose was not to shed blood, not to destroy property, not to inaugurate the dreadful scenes which marked the career of insurrection in India, but simply to inaugurate a great exodus of slaves from their masters, a grand exodus from the plains to the mountains of Virginia, which were a grand highway from slavery to freedom. According to his (Mr. Douglass’s) knowledge, John Brown, by his original plan, only aimed at a grand exodus of the slaves of Virginia into the Free States, and from the Free States up into Canada, where the British lion, with its shaggy mane, welcomed the bondman, and where he could lay his head free from the fierce talons and bloody beak of the American eagle. They might be assured, however, that in case his march had been interrupted, he would not have hesitated to use arms. He had no conscientious scruples on that point. He was perfectly willing to use arms in self-defence. Insurrection was not his first aim, and the question now arose would the course pursued by John Brown be defended? It was said that he did wrong in going into a peaceful community and raising a standard of insurrection, but was a slave-holding community to be regarded as a peaceful community at all? To his mind a slave-holding community was in a state of insurrection. He looked upon every slaveholder as an armed insurgent against the just rights of his fellow-men. The whole system was one grand, one wholesale insurrection and uprising on the part of the strong to enslave the weak and trample on the helpless. Peaceful community! There was no peace there. There was not an hour in any day, there was not a minute in any hour, there was not a moment in any speck of time, in which the blood of his people was not called forth by the scourge. John Brown had stepped into the community where men were beating and scouring their fellow-men, and cried, “Hold, we are men.” This was John Brown’s mission: it was not to interrupt the peace of a community. There was no peace in slavery. But it was said, “You are not to resort to force.” He himself had been shown the cold shoulder since he came to this country by some old-fashioned abolitionists, because of his supposed complicity with this Harper’s Ferry outbreak. He did not mean to state to this audience that he was or was not implicated in the affair. Perhaps it was proper that he should say nothing on the subject; but one thing he asserted that no man had been able to prove that he was at all implicated in the affair. (Laughter and applause.) But because of his supposed implication, he was supposed to be a man of war, of blood, and so forth; but he was a peace man, and his peace principles were those which he derived from the Bible. The first mode of establishing peace, according to the Bible, was to establish justice. It was so in California, where men were brought together under an impulse – love of gain. There it became necessary first to establish justice. There could be no peace where there was oppression: there could be no peace where there was injustice. There could be no peace between one man standing on the neck of his brother, and the man who was under his heel. He was not for maintaining peace between these parties, and the reason was that the very submission of the slave for 200 years to his bondage, in the United States, without resistance, without resorting to force to break his chains, was one of the strongest arguments in the mouths of the tyrants themselves for perpetuating the tyranny. He was for submitting to injury when submission could be construed into a Christian grace, but when it was construed into a want of courage, then he said – It is time, forebearance has ceased to be a virtue. He wished to throw in a few exculpatory circumstances for his poor friend – he would not say poor, for he believed John Brown was rich – far richer to-night than any of those tyrants whose chambers were built by fraud in Virginia. The principle on which he acted ought to be held up. It would be a proclamation of a millennium to tyrants to let them say, that hereafter they need not fear these worms. The day was coming when the slave would be free; whether by peace or by war he knew not. Slavery could not much longer exist in the United States. There were four millions of them, and God did not permit four millions of people to exist in any quarter of his globe without His eye being on them. He (Mr. Douglass) did not, of course, ask them to unite in any effort at forcible emancipation, but he did ask them to say that the man who was unjustly deprived of his liberty had a right to get his liberty – peaceably if he could, forcibly if he must. And if a man had a right to get his liberty, he had a right to be helped to get it. He thought it about the first thing that a man had to do in this world in order to be a man, was to be free. No man in a state of slavery was in a condition to honour his Maker; the man was extinguished, the soul crushed out of him, when the haughty master arrogantly assumed towards his brother man the position which God alone could claim. He was thus for peace, but no peace to the wicked – no peace to those who robbed and enslaved their fellow-men. But it was said that John Brown’s raid was a failure. He was not so sure of that. He was not sure that John Brown had not succeeded much better for the cause – though not for himself – by the failure than he would have done if he had been able to hold out till this time. John Brown had dropped an idea in connection with slavery in the right place, where no railroad could carry it – where no electric wires could convey it – where no man could bear it in any way. They would see, by glancing at the map of the United States, the Alleghany chain of mountains running into the very heart of Pennsylvania. These mountains run through the very heart of the slave states, and seemed to have been planted there for the very purpose to which John Brown intended to put them, and so they might yet be used. John Brown had suggested that idea. There were dens, caves, and ravines among them: there were ten thousand hiding-places, ten thousand Sebastopols built by the hand of God, stronger than any Sebastopol, stronger than any fortress built by man, where the slaves might flee and hide, and defend themselves, and defy all the armies of the United States in any attempt to dislodge them. No one, it seemed, had ever thought of it until John Brown dropped the idea among them. Mr. Douglass then mentioned the fact that in Congress 105 members were in favour of the abolition of slavery, and that 25 had dared to tell the slaveholders that they regarded slavery as a crime. He referred also to the support which many clergymen in the United States gave to slavery, and particularised Dr. Southside Adams, Dr. Blayden, Dr. Latham, and Mr. Spencer.1 After an eloquent appeal in favour of some degree of interference by Britain in this question, he concluded by saying that he certainly hoped to go back to America notwithstanding – (Mr. Douglass filled up his sentence by a significant nod in allusion to the reward of $50,000 which Governor Wyse of Virginia had offered for him, and resumed his seat amid laughter and long-continued applause.)

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