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357 DOUGLASS MONTHLY November, 1860. [[line]] [[3 columns]] [[column one]] rit Smith is waiting to see whether he cannot vote for Hale.' 'Gerrit Smith says Fremont is a good anti-slavery man.' Frederick Douglass was but one among thousands, who said they went to Fremont, because they believed Gerrit Smith desired them to do so. My 'pen and lips,' in the meantime, were working incessantly, to get votes for you.- Sometime afterward, I learned, to my mortification, from your own lips, on a public occasion, that from the time you saw the smallness of the Convention that nominated you, (and what marvel that it was small?) you took no interest in the nomination. Why then, I thought to myself, should I have taken so much interest in it? And now, let me ask you seriously, my old friend Gerrit Smith, do you think that you ought to expect of me, that, after such an exerience, I should exhaust the flickering lamp of my life, and in my old age, in the toilsome and bootless task, of using 'my pen and lips' any more, in this manner? Ought you to reproach me, because I decline doing so? Ought you to discredit the sincerity of my reasons? Ought you to allow your imagination to get the better of your sober judgment, and accustomed 'charity' and conjur up other reasons instead of them? Where are your old friends and supporters, John Thomas, Abram Pryne, Henry Catlin, and others like them, whom certainly you will not charge with any 'impatience with what they regard your religion?' Are them employing their 'pens and lips' to get votes for you? Or are they at work for Lincoln? Henry Catlin in his [[italics]] Erie True American, [[/italics]] says that William Goodell's [[italics]] Principia, [[/italics]] is the only remaining journal on the Radical Abolition platform. Why then is William Goodell singled out for your uncharitable suspicions? I have heard no reproofs of Gerrit Smith for John Thomas, Abram Pryne, and Henry Catlin, who have deserted him to support Lincoln, which I have not done. I have not even heard from Gerrit Smith, any direct and explicit denial of the reiterated assertion of John Thomas in the [[italics]] State League, [[/italics]] that Gerrit Smith himself, desires the election of Lincoln, while the statement, (as in 1856, respecting Fremont) is running the rounds of the Republican papers, in staring capitals. I do not forget your severe denunciation of those who vote for the Republican candidate, nor do I forget that we had them also in 1856, alternating with your commendations for Fremont, to the bewilderment and perplexity of your friends. You speak of my having 'warned' others not to vote for you. I have only stated, as my position as Editor required me to state, frankly, that I could not vote for you. And I was obliged, of course, to give the reasons. And now you compel me to vindicate the sincerity and truthfulness of my reasons. Beyond this I have no intention of going. I have neither time, space, strength or desire, to enter into a political warfare with Gerrit Smith. I wish to leave all abolitionists to act in accordance with their own conviction, as I have done, and intend to do. 4. As to your charging upon 'Orthodoxy,' the blame of dividing the Liberty Party, by its high demands and by setting up a theological test in politics, my Review will show to the attentive reader, that if the Liberty Party is the theologically divided, the high demand and the theological tests will have come from the [[italics]] anti [[/italics]] orthodox side. This I think I shall make too evident to admit of controversy, in my next letter. Your old friend, WILLIAM GOODELL. [[line]] --The Woman's Library in New York is making rapid progress in public favor, Classes in French, German, book keeping, drawing &c., will be commenced this winter, and the fee for entrance will be small. The terms of subscription are $1 a year, but the rule is not insisted on in cases where exaction would deprive and poor, but intelligent girl of the advantages to be derived from good reading. [[line]] --A Belleverett man, of Uniontown, Ala., has been flogged for declaring that in case of disunion he would shoulder his musket, go North, and fight against the South. [[/column one]] [[column two]] [[bold]] CHRISTIANITY AND COLOR. [[/bold]] ----- BY HORACE GREELY. ----- There are in the State of New York some fifty or sixty thousand persons wholly or partially of negro blood; in all the Free States, perhaps five times that number. As the Christianity of our day, even the worst of it, recognizes these despised Pariahs as having souls to be saved or lost, it is not necessary to convince it that they are human beings-- a portion of that the great family of man which, our Declaration of Independence asserts, God has created equal, and endowed with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These blacks are not an attractive, as they are not a favorite class. They have great faults, as all degraded, down-trodden tribes or races have, and always have had. What Israelite of any age would be likely to regard with complacency an account, by one of Pharaoh's historiographers, of the descendants of Jacob as they dwelt in the land of Goshen in the earlier prime of Moses? The blacks among us are often vicious, indolent, dissipated, as too many whites are likewise, without half their excuse. The blacks are too generally ignorant: what have been and are their opportunities for learning? They are vicious: but how deficient their inducements to virtue compared with those of whites? They are grovelling in their tastes and appetites: what is their incitement to nobleness and self-denying effort? Let him do his best, and let that be the equal of any man's best, and what can the negro achieve? The world is full of discontented, unhappy, despondent whites; but which of them, in the very agony of despair, ever wishes himself a Negro? Can any Christian seriously doubt that, if Jesus of Nazareth were this day on earth, and New York his abiding place, he would regard with indignation the treatment of this crushed caste--its rigorous exclusion alike from fashionable churches and from fashionable hotels, save in some attitude which bespeaks their despised condition? Suppose the Savior of mankind should, by some miraculous interposition, be permitted to preach in Grace church or Trinity, and should there see notorious libertines in the social and swindlers in the commercial world occupying seats of honor, while humble saints, guilty of a dark skin, were either shut out or rigidly confined to the 'negro pew,' would not that arrangement be likely to find a place among the topics of discourse? But the Christ of the poor and the lowly does not preach, and is seldom preached in such costly and sumptuous edifices--had He done so, it could not have taken John Jay ten years of steady, resolute struggle to secure to the single congregation of colored Episcopalians in this city its clear constitutional right to be represented in the Diocesan Convention. Only in spirit, and in the universal applicability of the great, universal truths He uttered while on earth, does He now say to the oppressor and his parasites, the advocate of man's inalienable rights and his backers, 'Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of the least of these my disciples, ye did it unto me' Let us consider, then, in the light of eternal principle, the present attitude of the organized, embodied Christianity of New York toward the people of color providentially among us. There are in this city some three hundred Christian churches, while from its presses hardly less than twenty professedly Christian periodicals are steadily issues. Those churches those periodicals, necessarily exert a very great influence over the opinions, the acts of perhaps one million voters. A large proportion of those voters are called to vote in November directly on the question, 'Shall black men in this State hold and enjoy the right of suffrage on the same terms with white men? or shall they alone be denied a voice in making and modifying the laws which they must obey, and in choosing the rulers by whom those laws are to be enforced?' Can there [[/column two]] [[column three]] be any serious doubt as to which is the essentially CHRISTIAN side to this controversy? A black who transgresses any law of the State of New York is held to at least rigorous account for that transgression as tho' he were white. Let him steal, or forge, or maim, and a white magistrate will speedily issue a warrant for his arrest, a white policeman or deputy sheriff arrest him, a white prosecutor arraign him, a white judge try him, a white jury find him guilty, and a white turnkey lock him up and set him at work for the State. Whether he have or have not rights which white men are bound to respect, he will be most impressively taught that [[italics]] they [[/italics]] have rights, and that he cannot help respecting them. For all purposes of responsibility to law and punishment for violating, he is regarded as a rational, capable, responsible human being: why not for correlative responsibilities and privileges of citizenship as well? But the case is too plain for argument--The disfranchised class are so disfranchised not because they are ignorant, or vicious, or in any manner incompetent, but because they are black. 'To this complexion' the whole matter inevitably comes at last. An irreclaimable loafer, an incorrigibly drunken vagabond, a habitual rowdy and law-defyer, and ten thousand keepers of policy offices, brothels, and gambling-houses and grog shops--all these, if white, as they mostly are--are unquestioned voters: while the most exemplary Christian, if at once poor and black, is disfranchised. And a great majority of the Christian churches, the Christian periodicals, the Christian professors of our city, raise no voice in remonstrance against this flagrant injustice and wrong! At our ensuing election, those Christians who believe that the Golden Rule applies as clearly and searchingly to voting as to ruling, trading, or any other exercise of our volition whereby our neighbors are or may be seriously affected, are required to vote for or against abolishing the Property Qualification now exacted in our State of black men. It is not desirable and requisite that every Christian should bestir himself in favor of Equal Suffrage, and should endeavor to enlist his neighbors and his brethren in the church actively in favor of the same righteous decision? [[line]] [[bold]] NEGRO INSURRECTION. [[/bold]] ----- The slave insurrection panic seems to be fast growing among our Southern brethren into a chronic disorder. It does not indeed affect at the same time all parts of the country; it may rather be compared in its operations to the neuralgia, tormenting the unhappy patients now here, now there, now in the head, now in the foot, sometimes in the heart, darting suddenly, with its sharp twinging pains, from one extremity of the slaveholding body to the other, but scarcely for a moment ceasing to torment it somewhere. The paroxysm of this ugly disorder by which Texas was lately visited, resulted in the hanging of a Methodist minister or two, the beating, tarring and feathering, and expulsion from the State, of sundry white men, and the summary murder of a number of negroes, has now suddenly transferred itself to Norfolk, Virginia. The most remarkable effect of a twinge of this unfortunate complaint in its disturbing operation upon the mind, seeming to extinguish for the moment, in those individuals affected by it, all judgment and common sense, and exposing them to be frightened out of their wits by the most improbable stories.--Such was the case in Texas--the story there being that the negroes had provided themselves with an unlimited quantity of strychnine, with which they were to poison all the wells, and thus exterminate the white population-- The story by which the City of Norfolk, and the neighboring rural districts, are now consternated, is of about equal common sense and probability. We are assured that a plan of operations has been maturing ever since last Spring, it being shrewdly surmised that the mad fanatics who originated it had some design on Gov. Wise and his family, on account of the firm and decided stand he took in the [[/column three]
