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September, 1860. Douglass' Monthly
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    SPEECH OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS,
[[italics]]Delivered at Geneva, N.Y., August 1st, 1860, on the occasion of the Twenty-Sixth Anniversary of Emancipation in the British West Indies. [[/italics]]
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  Mr. President:—I thank you very sincerely for the kind and cordial welcome you have been pleased, on behalf of this vast audience, to extend to me, and also for the words of sympathy with me in the experiences through which I have passed since our last meeting in this place. I esteem it a high privilege, especially in view of the many vicissitudes and exciting incidents of the past twelve months, to join you again in appropriate recognition of this anniversary of freedom. It is now twenty-six years since the justice and humanity of England represented in the British Parliament and throne, abolished and put an end to slavery in the British West Indies forever. No greater demonstration of philanthropy has occurred during the present century. It astonished the world by its grandeur. Men could hardly believe that humanity could so succeed against the selfishness of property.—The transition for the slaves emancipated was a most wonderful experience. In all our emancipations in the United States, we have had nothing so sudden and so startling as this. The slaves were eight hundred thousand chattels yesterday; they were eight hundred thousand free men and women the next day. It was a trying event. It tested the metal of slaves as well as masters, and the behavior of the former proved them worthy of their newly gained freedom. Emancipation had been looked for and prayed for by the scarred and mutilated bondman; but even they must have found it hard to believe that they were now forever free. Yet, in the doubt, and in the assurance, and in the great joy of the occasion, their behavior was equally orderly and beautiful.
  Many of the old slave-drivers anticipated the event with the gloomiest forebodings. Knowing how well they had deserved vengeance, they shuddered at the thought of its possible approach. Guilty men! they read human nature wrong. They who study mankind with a whip in their hands, will always go wrong. They see but one side of everything about them, and that is the worst side. They only see without, the qualities they feel within themselves. Pride, self-love, cruelty, brutality and revenge had been cultivated with all the approved instruments of torture on the plantation. These qualities they knew and well understood; but they did not see the higher elements of human nature. According to their dismal fears and predictions, the Islands were to be desolated. The white inhabitants were to be slaughtered. Fire and sword were to be let loose, and neither age nor sex were to be spared.
  It is one of the glories of the occasion and the event, that every such prediction and objection was refuted by the grand result. Not even the most unscrupulous and eager slanderers of the negro race have been able to sustain a charge of violence against the emancipated bondmen. Peace, joy and gratitude combined to sanctify and hallow the glorious advent of liberty.
  We meet here to-day, as we met here last year, to honor this high and brilliant example of British justice towards a people every where spoken against. The event is worthy the attention of all men, but to the American people it addresses itself with tenfold power and force as an example fit to be honored and imitated. Tho First of August is, and of right ought to be, the great abolition day for all the friends of freedom. In regard to England, a very significant and gratifying fact may be stated. Notwithstanding all the years of clamor against the results of emancipation, England has steadily persisted in its abolition policy.
  The abolition of slavery in the West Indies is now, as at the beginning, esteemed by every true hearted Briton as the chief glory of his country. And well it may be.—It was the result of the very best elements of 
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cultivated human nature. The labor, the zeal, the earnestness, and the perseverance employed in bringing the British people to see slavery in its true character, and to bring them to act for its abolition, were never excelled by those of any other great reformatory movement. The people there talk to this day of the mighty enthusiasm that rocked the land, and every man is proud to say that he had a hand in the great work. The British public, though weighed down and staggering under a heavy weight of taxation, bore without a murmur, the additional burden of twenty millions sterling. If there was any complaint at all, it was that the masters got it instead of the slaves. How striking and humiliating is the contrast in respect to slavery, between England and America, the mother and the daughter! If the merits of republican institutions, as against those of a monarchy, were made to depend upon the character and history of the American Republic, monarchical institutions would most certainly bear off the palm. The British monarchy, self-moved and self-sustained, emancipated, set free, and clothed with the dignity of citizenship, nearly a million slaves at a single stroke of the pen, and then began to exert, and continues to exert her great moral influence to make her noble example felt throughout the world.
  It is really amazing how far into the regions of darkness and sorrow this knowledge of British feeling has penetrated. The most ignorant slave on the banks of the Red River has by some means or other come to learn that the English are the friends of the African race. Her ships are on the gold coast; they are in the Gulf of Mexico, and along the coast of the Brazils in search of slave pirates, only secure from arrest when they hoist the American flag. While the British monarch thus employs its powers, how is it with our so-called Christian Protestant Republic? The story is soon told. Four millions clank their fetters at the very doors of our churches and our Government. The slave trade, long ago abolished by the humanity of your revolutionary fathers, is now openly defended, and is secretly carried on, with the evident connivance of the Government in various ports of the South. The policy of limiting slavery, which comes down to us from the founders of the government, has been set aside by the Dred Scott decision. Free colored men, who, in the better days of the Republic, were regarded and treated as American citizens, have been made aliens and enemies in the land of their birth. Slave-hunting, which had died out under the quiet influence of a partial civilization, has now, in the middle of the nineteenth century, been thoroughly revived. Thus, while the British Government, with far less pretension to liberty than we, is wielding the mighty power and influence which her position and greatness give her, for the promotion of liberty and humanity throughout the world—the American government is worse than winking at the slave trade, and slavers are fitted out in sight of our business men's prayer meetings. It is evidently the design of the Slave Power of this Republic to fasten the terrible curse of human bondage upon every quarter of this continent.
  But England is not the only nation whose conduct stands in marked and striking contrast with our own. There stands Russia, grim and terrible, half way between barbarism and civilization—a conglomeration of many races, darkened by ages of wide-spread cruelty and blood—governed by a despotism, cold and hard as granite—supremely indifferent to the good or ill opinion of mankind—with no freedom of tongue, no freedom of press—yet even she proves herself more just and wise in her day and generation than we. She knows enough, and is wise enough to make friends of her own household. The car of emancipation is advancing gloriously in that country; the shouts of millions, headed by the Emperor Alexander himself, go up in joy over the freedom of the Russian serf. 
  But with us how different is the spectacle! Slavery is everywhere the pet monster of the 
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American people. All our political parties and most of our churches, kneel with humility at its accursed shrine of tears and blood! Each part vies with the other in its zealous self-abasement and servile devotion. In our politics, as well as in our religion, he who refuses to join in the worship of whips, and in acknowledgement of the charity of chains, is stigmatized as a blasphemer, and an enemy to the State. We read, the Chaldean monarch set up an image of gold for his subjects to worship. That was bad enough, and one may rejoice that there was virtue enough in the three Hebrews to refuse to kneel. But bad as the image was an object of worship, the thing itself was not undesirable. But our object of worship is in itself revolting. A vulture feeding on a living and quivering human heart, tearing it to pieces with his remorseless talons and bloody beak, would be an appropriate symbol of the object of our national devotion. For where under the whole heavens can there be found any system of wrong and cruelty to compare with our slavery? Who has measured its vast extent, found its limits, or sounded the depths of its wickedness? Language fails to describe it, and the human mind, though winged with a fancy outflying the lightning, fails to overtake and comprehend this huge and many-headed abomination. I know slavery as well as most men. I was born in it, as most of you know; but though I have been a victim to what has broken the spirit and cowed into servility many a better than myself, I have not yet been able to convey even [[italics]] my [[/italics]] limited sense of the ten thousand wrongs of slavery. I have spoken and written much on the subject during the last twenty years, and have been at times accused of exaggeration; and yet I can say, with truth, that I have fallen short in describing the pains and woes, and in painting the unbroken stream of sorrow and sighing mercilessly poured down upon the sable millions doomed to life long bondage in this boasted free country. Slavery has been denounced as the sum of all villainies. The language is well chosen. But who can grapple with a thing so huge as the sum of all villanies? The idea is too large and dreadful for the imagination. The warp and woof of slavery is yet to be unraveled.—Each bloody thread just yet be disentangled and drawn forth, before men will thoroughly understand and duly hate the enormity, or properly abhor its upholders and work its abolition. This is the work still to be done. After all the books, pamphlets and periodicals—after all the labors of the Abolitionists at home and abroad—we have still to make the American people acquainted with the sin and crime of our slave system.
  In this good work, let me acknowledge the sentiment of gratitude which you and I feel on this occasion to HON. CHARLES SUMNER, of Massachusetts.  It is more than empty praise to say that we recognize him as the WILBERFORCE of America.  He has brought to the right side of the discussion a quenchless zeal, and an irresistible earnestness.  His large culture and eminent talents have been industriously applied to the work of placing before the world the monstrous crime and withering barbarism of our country. For this great service, I embrace this occasion to thank him, in my own name, and in the name of our whole people. Many other noble men have spoken, and spoken well. We thank them all—we appreciate them all; but among them all, none has uttered the feelings of the black man so well; none have hurled at slavery such a succession of moral thunder-bolts as he. Were MR. SUMNER only a non-extensionist, we might not mention his name for special honor on this memorable day. But the brave Senator from Massachusetts takes rank with a higher order of men, and is engaged in a sublime work. The principles which he enunciates, the doctrines which he maintains, with an eloquence unmatched in the American Senate, and unsurpassed out of it, compel us to rank him with the SHARPES, the CLARKSONS, the BUXTONS, and the BROUGHAMS of England—the great men whose mighty efforts have given us [[/column 3]]