What is Wendell Phillips' claim in the letter? How does he support his claim
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What is Wendell Phillips' claim in the letter? How does he support his claim?
Transcribed Image Text:FROM WENDELL PHILLIPS, ESQ.
xvi
LETTER FROM WENDELL PHILLIPS, ESQ.
I was glad to learn, in your story, how early the most
neglected of God's children waken to a sense of their rights, and
of the injustice done them. Experience is a keen teacher; and
long before you had mastered your A B C, or knew where the
"white sails" of the Chesapeake were bound, you began, I see,
to gauge the wretchedness of the slave, not by his hunger and
want, not by his lashes and toil, but by the cruel and blighting
death which gathers over his soul.
In connection with this, there is one circumstance which
makes your recollections peculiarly valuable, and renders your
early insight the more remarkable. You come from that part of
the country where we are told slavery appears with its fairest
features. Let us hear, then, what it is at its best estate-gaze on
its bright side, if it has one; and then imagination may task her
powers to add dark lines to the picture, as she travels southward
to that (for the colored man) Valley of the Shadow of Death,
where the Mississippi sweeps along.
Again, we have known you long, and can put the most
entire confidence in your truth, candor, and sincerity. Every one
who has heard you speak has felt, and, I am confident, every
one who reads your book will feel, persuaded that you give
them a fair specimen of the whole truth. No one-sided
portrait,-no wholesale complaints,-but strict justice done,
whenever individual kindliness has neutralized, for a moment,
the deadly system with which it was strangely allied. You have
been with us, too, some years, and can fairly compare the
twilight of rights, which your race enjoy at the North, with that
"noon of night" under which they labor south of Mason and
Dixon's line. Tell us whether, after all, the half-free colored
man of Massachusetts is worse off than the pampered slave of
the rice swamps!
In reading your life, no one can say that we have unfairly
picked out some rare specimens of cruelty. We know that the
LETTER
BOSTON, April 22, 1845.
My Dear Friend:
You remember the old fable of "The Man and
the Lion," where the lion complained that he should not be so
misrepresented “when the lions wrote history."
I am glad the time has come when the "lions write history."
We have been left long enough to gather the character of
slavery from the involuntary evidence of the masters. One
might, indeed, rest sufficiently satisfied with what, it is evident,
must be, in general, the results of such a relation, without
seeking farther to find whether they have followed in every
instance. Indeed, those who stare at the half-peck of corn a
week, and love to count the lashes on the slave's back, are
seldom the "stuff' out of which reformers and abolitionists are
to be made. I remember that, in 1838, many were waiting for
the results of the West India experiment, before they could
come into our ranks. Those "results" have come long ago; but,
alas! few of that number have come with them, as converts. A
man must be disposed to judge of emancipation by other tests
than whether it has increased the produce of sugar,-and to hate
slavery for other reasons than because it starves men and whips
women,-before he is ready to lay the first stone of his anti-
slavery life.
Transcribed Image Text:LETTER FROM WENDELL PHILLIPS, ESQ.
LETTER FROM WENDELL PHILLIPS, ESQ.
xvii
bitter drops, which even you have drained from the cup, are no
xvii
incidental aggravations, no individual_ills, but such as must
mingle always and necessarily in the lot of every slave. They
ore the essential ingredients, not the occasional results, of the
Yet it is sad to think, that these very throbbing hearts which
welcome your story, and form your best safeguard in telling it,
are all beating contrary to the "statute in such case made and
provided." Go on, my dear friend, till you, and those who, like
you, have been saved, so as by fire, from the dark prison-house,
shall stereotype these free, illegal pulses into statutes; and New
England, cutting loose from a blood-stained Union, shall glory
in being the house of refuge for the oppressed;-till we no
longer merely "hide the outcast," or make a merit of standing
idly by while he is hunted in our midst; but, consecrating anew
the soil of the Pilgrims as an asylum for the oppressed, proclaim
our welcome to the slave so loudly, that the tones shall reach
every hut in the Carolinas, and make the broken-hearted
bondman leap up at the thought of old Massachusetts.
God speed the day!
system.
A fer all, I shall read your book with trembling for you.
Some years ago, when you were beginning to tell me your real
name and birthplace, you máy remember I stopped you, and
preferred to remain ignorant of all. With the exception of a
vaque description, so I continued, till the other day, when you
read me your memoirs. I hardly knew, at the time, whether to
thank you or not for the sight of them, when I reflected that it
was still dangerous, in Massachusetts, for honest men to tell
their names! They say the fathers, in 1776, signed the
Declaration of Independence with the halter about their necks.
Vou too, publish your declaration of freedom with danger
compassing you around. In all the broad lands which the
Constitution of the United States overshadows, there is no
single spot.-however narrow or desolate,-where a fugitive
slave can plant himself and say, "I am safe." The whole armory
of Northern Law has no shield for you. I am free to say that, in
Till then, and ever,
Yours truly,
WENDELL PHILLIPS.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS.
your place, I should throw the MS. into the fire.
You, perhaps, may tell your story in safety, endeared as
you are to so many warm hearts by rare gifts, and a still rarer
devotion of them to the service of others. But it will be owing
only to your labors, and the fearless efforts of those who,
trampling the laws and Constitution of the country under their
feet, are determined that they will "hide the outcast," and that
their hearths shall be, spite of the law, an asylum for the
oppressed, if, some time or other, the humblest may stand in our
streets, and bear witness in safety against the cruelties of which
he has been the victim.
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