Brown gave this address at the 1860 annual convention of the American Anti-Slavery Society in New York City. Although he typically prepared his remarks with special care for this major event on the antislavery calendar, he was well-known for mixing humorous anecdotes of sometimes questionable authenticity with serious commentary on the state of the racial union. In this instance, he went even further by poking fun at his own mixed-race heritage, which by association also reflected back onto his presumed aristocratic white cousins “Fanny” and “Bob” in their native Kentucky.
MR. CHAIRMAN, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: The colored man in this country may well exclaim, “Suffering is the badge of all our race.” Go into the Southern States and there he need not utter such an exclamation; it is seen on the surface of society; it is seen all through the slave States. The slave at the South, to-day is enduring a bondage such as no other country has ever yet inflicted upon a people. We look in vain to all lands to find a parallel to the system of chattel slavery in Louisiana, Mississippi and the Carolinas. Slavery in the West Indies never came up to what it is in the Southern States. In Cuba, to-day, there are many circumstances surrounding the slave that make his servitude far preferable to slavery in the States. In Cuba, if a slave, by some meritorious act, or by industry, shall secure the sum of $300, his master is compelled to set him free, on his making the claim and presenting the money. In the South, the slave may have ten times that amount given to him, perhaps for some act of heroism in saving the life of a white person, and yet the law declares that all the slave may possess shall be the property of the master. That is slavery in the South. The slave can own nothing; he is not allowed to protect himself, his wife, his children; he toils for another, and his offspring are put upon the auction-block and sold to the highest bidder. The slave is not permitted to get education; he is not permitted to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience. If half a dozen slaves are found together in the States where I was born and brought up, they are punished by the police, or by the person finding them, unless some white person is there to vouch for them.
The new importations into the South, the high prices paid for slaves, all show that the system is going forward as it has never gone forward before. The price of an able-bodied man, when I ran away from the South, was not more than seven or eight hundred dollars; to-day, a slave of the same description will bring double that sum in the New Orleans market. The cotton raised by the slave twenty years ago brought the master only about one-half what it brings to-day. The sugar, the cotton and the rice plantations all yield a better profit than formerly, and the slaveholder makes a business of driving cotton, sugar and rice out of his slaves, and the overseer who can raise the most of either of those articles, out of a given number of hands, claims a greater salary at the hands of the master.
Mr. Chairman, looking at the South and seeing the spirit of slavery, seeing how it has taken hold upon the people, seeing the importance that it has acquired, I am not surprised that the slaveholders are to-day trying to reduce the free colored people to bondage. That shows the demoralizing effects of the system upon the white people in the slave States. Some half dozen or more slave States, during the last two years, have introduced resolutions or bills in their different legislative bodies for reducing the free colored people to slavery, or driving them out of the State. Look at the free colored people driven from Arkansas within the last eight or nine months! Men, women and children driven out—driven away from what little property they had, without regard to age or sex—under penalty of being reduced to bondage! I saw the announcement recently, in a Tennessee paper, that a free colored woman who had left the State and returned, had been taken and sold to the highest bidder, bringing the sum of $1,200. The money, it was said, was given over to the school fund! A free colored woman in Alabama, a short time since, having gone into the State ignorantly in one of the steamers, was arrested, taken to the public square, and flogged thirty-nine lashes, and ordered to leave the State in ten days. That shows the meanness of the slaveholders.
Now, in regard to the free people of color, the slaveholders blow hot and blow cold when talking upon the subject. Some declare that the free colored people of the South are a nuisance and ought to be driven out; another, when it suits him, declares that they are a very orderly class of people, and among the best mechanics and artisans of the State, as Judge Catron said in a letter to the Legislature of his State, a short time since. I say they blow hot and blow cold. They are ready to use the free colored man when they can, they are ready to drive him out of the State when they want to get rid of him.
There is no justice at all for the free colored people in the slave States, and there seems to be but little justice for the colored people in the free States. They have no justice for us. We cannot have justice anywhere at the hands of this slaveholding nation. History has thrown the colored man out. You look in vain to Bancroft and the other historians for justice to the colored people. Although it is admitted that they fought in the war of the Revolution and in the last war, the historian passes it by. Go to the few monuments that have been erected to those who fell for liberty, and you will see that the colored man has been excluded, or, if he be found there at all, he is found, as in the monument at Fort Griswold, cut off from his white fellow-patriots by a broad line. On that monument, the names of the white men who fell in the Revolution are given first, and then a long line is drawn and the colored men put down—only the first name—Caesar, Jumbo, Pompey, Dick, Tom. The colored man is colonized off from the white man, or mentioned in a sort of appendix (laughter). Mr. Chairman, you, and all who have walked through the streets of London, and especially through Trafalgar Square, and have looked upon that noble monument there, in commemoration of the great deeds of Nelson, and his death in battle, have seen, as I saw there, a black man—as black a man as was ever imported from the coast of Africa—among the white soldiers, his musket in his hand, and his countenance showing that he was in the battle. He is there as large as life, as large as the white man; no mark is drawn between him and the white man. It seems that every country is willing to give the colored man justice, or something like justice, except the people of the United States.
I say that this is characteristic of this nation. It seems that we can have no justice whatever—nothing at all like justice. Citizenship is denied us. The Supreme Court of the United States declares that we are not citizens, and have no rights that white men are bound to respect. A colored man writes to Gen. Cass, your Secretary of State, and asks for a passport. He, like the whole American nation, is ready to utter a falsehood, and says that the colored man has never been recognized as a citizen, is not a citizen, and never has received a passport as a citizen from the government. Now, this is as gross a falsehood as could be uttered. It is well known that colored men have received passports. I have one in my pocket that I received at the hands of the Hon. Abbott Lawrence, in London, in exchange for a passport that I had carried from this country, certifying that I was a citizen of the United States. [Mr. Brown read the passport, which is in the usual form.] My friend Robert Purvis, who spoke so eloquently from this platform yesterday, also received a passport as a citizen of the United States; and another colored friend of mine, as black as black can be, received a passport, direct from Washington, certifying that he was a citizen of the United States.
I say we are going backward. This nation is determined not only to keep the colored man in slavery, but to reduce the free colored people to slavery, and blot out, so far as they can, everything that tends to show that the colored man is a man, and at all worthy of respect as a citizen of this country. But, Mr. Chairman, I rejoice at one thing—that while they are imposing upon black men in the slave States, they are also imposing upon white men. The Reign of Terror that has existed at the South since the John Brown invasion has brought the white man down to a level with the black man. As I have read in the newspapers of white men being chased out of the Carolinas, Virginia, Kentucky, and other States, I have rejoiced at it, because it shows that slavery is no respecter of persons; it cares no more for the rights of the white man than for those of the black man.
Mr. Brown then told the story of a miscreant who, by making love to a young girl of sixteen, free and white, induced her to elope with him, under promise of marriage, when he took her to Alabama, and sold her for $900. Then he came back, and, by representing to the brother of the girl that she was doing well in her new home, and desired to see him, induced him, too, to go with him to the South, where he also was sold for $700. At length the girl found means to inform her mother of her condition, who immediately went after her. She was brought before a court of justice upon a warrant, and the man who had purchased her, a clergyman, appeared and stated that he bought her in good faith, and that she had been very well treated, for she had been allowed to attend prayers with the white portion of the family every morning. The result was that the girl, who appeared in court with a young babe in her arms, was delivered up to her mother.
Now, continued Mr. Brown, I say that there is no justice for the colored man in this country. Every particle of pity is for the white man. Talk with a man about the slave or the abolition of slavery, and he begins to pity the white man; he has no pity for the black man. If he prays, he does it as Dr. Blagden did in Boston, at a Union meeting. He prayed, “Oh Lord, bless our country, our whole country, and especially the Southern half of our country” (laughter). It reminded me of an anecdote that I heard when I was in the South. Two men owned an old and blind black man, whom they kept in a shop turning out table-legs, bedstead-legs, &c. One of the men was pious, the other a great sinner. Well, the cholera came along, and the pious man wanted to sell out his half of the slave to the other, but he would not buy, and he asked more for his half than the pious man would give; so he determined he would put up a prayer to Heaven, and he prayed, “Oh Lord, protect my family and house from the cholera; protect my neighbors, all my relations, and especially my half of Sam!” (Much merriment.)
Now, Mr. Chairman, just as the condition of the colored man in this country begins to improve, and his prospects to look more encouraging, the white people are trying to get rid of him. Mr. Wade, a Republican, says he is tired of hearing so much said about the equality of the negro. Another Republican says he wants the colored people sent off to South America, New Mexico, or somewhere else. Another gets up and says that he is willing to give his vote for money to send the negroes out of the country to Africa. Now, my friends, let me say, on behalf of the colored people, that we are not going to Africa—we are not going to leave this country at all (applause). The slaveholders have mixed the Anglo-Saxon blood with ours, so that even in the pro-slavery cities of New York and Philadelphia colored men and women ride in the cars and omnibuses, and are so light that they are mistaken for white people, while the white man is so dark that he is sometimes taken for a negro (laughter). In 1844, Henry Clay, in one of his letters, said that slavery was to be abolished by the inevitable law of population. Some one asked him what he meant, and he said, “amalgamation, as carried on in the slave States.” It is fearful to think of or look at; but it is doing a work at the South at the present time, and we throw upon the slavocracy of the South the responsibility of the whole system of illegitimate amalgamation that exists in this country.
I say the black people are not going to leave the United States. We are connected with the South by the tenderest ties of nature. The free colored people of the North are connected with the slaves of the South. Many of the free colored people of the North, especially the fugitive slaves, are connected with the slaveholders of the South. They look into the Southern States, and they see there their white relatives as slaveholders. I met a good friend of mine yesterday, who came from the South about the time I did, and one of the first questions he asked me was, how my white relatives in Lexington prospered since I came away (laughter); and I asked after his white relatives. He wanted to know how my cousin William was, who is our Minister Plenipotentiary to the Court of Spain. The Hon. William Preston married my cousin Fanny (laughter). If you had been there, and heard us talking about our relatives, you would have thought that I was just from the United States Senate, for he knew very well that my relatives were among the first in the State of Kentucky. My cousin Bob Wickliffe—the Wickliffe family is a very aristocratic family in Kentucky—died a few months since, worth, it is said, five millions. My cousin Charles A. Wickliffe was Postmaster-General under John Tyler (laughter). Probably many of you don’t know anything about John Tyler, he filled such a small niche in our country’s history, but certainly you must have heard of my cousin Charles (great merriment).
Now, Mr. Chairman, and ladies and gentlemen, I do not look upon these white relatives of mine with as much pleasure as you would think, perhaps; but still, they are my relatives (laughter). Sometimes, you know, we find ourselves related to some people that we don’t care much about (renewed laughter). But I say, here we are. We are connected with the slaves and the slaveholders by the tenderest ties of nature; and if this country wants me to run away and leave my white relatives, I can’t do it (great merriment). If they want to drive me away from my black relatives, I shall stay here and labor for their emancipation (loud applause).
I speak thus, friends, because there is a great deal said now about colored emigration—about trying to coax the colored people out of the country, getting them to go off to some wilderness or some place they know nothing about. I have no objection to the black men entering into commercial enterprises, and going to California, Australia, or Africa, or anywhere else—I have no objection to their leaving the country and going where they think they can better their condition; but I am entirely opposed to the colored people becoming the victims of the Colonization Society, or any other scheme of expatriation. So far as I can, I shall say to our colored people, “Stay here! Educate yourselves! Attain to as high a point of culture as you possibly can, and remain here until you get your rights, so that you may labor the more effectually for the abolition of slavery in the Southern States!” (Applause.)
Mr. Chairman, I have sat here during these two days, and listened with interest to the speeches which have been made in the cause of freedom. I rejoiced yesterday in my heart that Dr. Cheever came here and made his speech, though I did not agree with him in every particular. Still, I am willing to welcome any one upon the platform of freedom who will come forward and speak for the slave, though he may not speak in my dialect. Let him come and speak rightly and speak truly; if he will only be honest and true, I, for one, will bid him God-speed in the cause of freedom. But I was speaking of the colored people of this country. They are determined to labor on, to work on. They have faith in the great cause of freedom, faith in the Anti-Slavery movement, that it will eventually abolish slavery in this land. Progress is written all over the land. Although the slavocracy are trying to wipe out every landmark we have in this country, still everything indicates that the cause of freedom is advancing, on the one hand, while slavery is making progress on the other. Every one must have noted how the Southern States have tried and are trying to wipe out everything that points to freedom. The Declaration of Independence, if it is read at all on the 4th of July in the Southern States, is not commented upon as it was twenty or thirty years ago. The Fourth of July orator dare not speak in the Southern States unless he qualifies the expression. In the pulpit, if a minister speak of freedom, it must be with a qualification. Everything is done in order to wipe out the old landmarks. It was my pleasure and privilege to visit Paris in 1849, where I saw the motto of the Republic upon the public buildings and at the corners of the streets—“Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”; and up and down the Boulevards, and on the Champ Elysses, were planted the Liberty-trees. This went on very well for a time, but by-and-by comes Louis Napoleon. He has in his mind’s eye an empire, with himself as emperor, and he commences blotting out these landmarks of the Republicans. The Liberty-trees are cut down by the soldiery and painters are ordered to blot out the words, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” upon the public buildings. It was only preparing the nation to receive its master. Now, Slavery is determined to triumph and rule in this country. The Supreme Court has been converted into an instrument of falsehood; the United States Senate has been converted into an instrument of torture, and an American citizen is carried there, and, if he is unwilling to answer questions that he conscientiously believes he is not bound to answer, he is thrown into prison; and Slavery, with a lie upon its lips, sends its officers to Massachusetts, and seeks to kidnap a free citizen of that State, and drag him to Washington. That shows the iniquity of the whole system of slavery in the Southern States, and the iniquity of this government, as it is administered by the slavocracy of the land. I say to my colored friends, if a white man is kidnapped from the free States, if a white man is unjustly imprisoned in Washington, if a white woman is sold as a slave in the Southern States, what justice can the colored people expect at the hands of this nation? They can expect none at all.
But I say the cause of freedom is going forward. We have the truth on our side, and that shall make us free. The tree of Liberty has been planted; it is growing, its branches are spreading all over the land, and the spirit of freedom is entering the hearts and consciences of the people; and with the poet we may well say,
“Our plant is of the cedar,
That knoweth not decay;
Its growth shall bless the mountains,
Till mountains pass away;
Its top shall greet the sunshine,
Its leaves shall drink the rain,
While on its lower branches
The slave shall hang his chain”
(Prolonged cheering.)