Viewing page 1 of 16

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

^[[R. K. Ross]]

DOUGLASS' MONTHLY.
[[double line across page]]
"OPEN THY MOUTH FOR THE DUMB, IN THE CAUSE OF ALL SUCH AS ARE APPOINTED TO DESTRUCTION; OPEN THY MOUTH, JUDGE RIGHTEOUSLY, AND PLEAD THE CAUSE OF THE POOR AND NEEDY."-—1[[italics]] st Eccl. xxxi. [[/italics]] 8,9.
[[double line across page]]
VOLUME III. }  ROCHESTER, NEW YORK, JANUARY, 1861.  {PRICE--
NUMBER VIII.}                                       {ONE DOLLAR PER ANNUM.
[[double line across page]]
[[column 1 of 3]]
CONTENTS OF THE PRESENT NUMBER.
[[line]]
The Boston Mob of December, 1860............385
Emigration to Hayti.........................386
Dissolution of the American Union...........387
The President's Message.....................388
Those Pictures Again........................389
Letter from A.H. Francis....................389
Acknowledgements............................389
Free Speech Outraged in Boston..............390
Ira Aldridge in Scotland....................396
A Fugitive Slave Claimed in Canada..........397
The Colored People and Hayti ...............398
Death of Mr. H.O. Remington.................399
Frederick Douglass in Ogdensburgh...........399
Advertisements..............................400
[[double line]]

DOUGLASS' MONTHLY 
[[double line]]
The Boston Mob of December 1860.
[[short line]]
The details of this mob have found their way to the public through a thousand different channels, and a pretty full description of it may be read in our present monthly.  Nothing need be added to what has been said in this line; and yet, as one who witnessed the mob, and was in some sort a subject of its fury, we may properly be expected to add our testimony as to its character and merits.

In the first place, it was no vulgar, passionate outbreak of popular feeling, led on by the humble and poor, the base and the ignorant, roused to fury by what they deemed an unwarrantable and intolerable outrage.—-It may well be described, as it has been--the gentlemen's mob. Its rank and file, not less than its leaders, claim position with the upper classes of Boston society.  They were gentlemen of the 'DOLLAR STAMP', well dressed, well conditioned, well looking, and doubtless, on occasions, pass very well for gentlemen.—-We have no disposition to underrate their quality.  One could see at a glance that these gentlemen were none of your practiced ruffians, and were badly fitted to play the ruffian's part.  Their leader, Mr. RICHARD S. FAY, though he had been fully informed of the part he was to play as Chairman of the captured meeting, and had his resolutions all ready to offer, and his little speech already prepared, evinced much agitation.  He made a strong effort to control his nerves, and to seem composed; but it was of no use--he trembled like a man with the palsy. A friend of ours, observing his trepidation, sang out, 'Read away; nobody is going to hurt you!'  The hit was excellent, but did but little to reassure our nervous Chairman, for he seemed to tremble all the more for the interruption.  It all his movements he appeared conscious of the mean, wicked and lawless business in which he was engaged, and before he got through, evidently wished himself well out of the scrape into which he was hopelessly plunged.

It will be seen by recurring to the detailed accounts in our other columns, that the mob, though vigorously supported by the Mayor and police, was, after all, a failure.  The JOHN BROWN anniversary was celebrated in Boston, and the friends of freedom and free 
[[/column 1 of 3]]

[[column 2 of 3]]
speech had their say.  After the Tremont Temple meeting was broken up by the Mayor and the mob, Mr. J. SELLA MARTIN instantly announced that the meeting would be continued in the evening at the Joy Street Baptist Church, of which he is the pastor.  The announcement was brave, but the holding of the meeting under the circumstances was more brave.  It tested the mettle of the men engaged in it.  Enemies threatened, friends deprecated, inflammatory appeals were circulated, the authorities were against it, and at one time it seemed that the officers of the 'Joy Street Church' would quail, and refuse the use of the house.  Mr. MARTIN, upon learning that his trustees were about to shut the doors of his church against the meeting, promptly told them that if that were done, they could never open their doors to him again.  Such conduct needs no commendation.  The church was opened, the officers nobly deciding that it were better that the house should be pulled down than that colored people should surrender the right of free speech at the dictation of an unprincipled and lawless mob, and of cowardly officers unwilling to do their duty. We have never seen men and women more fully in earnest.   Too much honor cannot be awarded to Mr. WENDELL PHILLIPS for the part he bore in the Joy Street meeting.  Through a mob raging in the street, threatening to tear down his house over the head of his wife—-she an invalid—-with Mrs. CHAPMAN on his arm, Mr. PHILLIPS walked calmly to the meeting, and took his seat with the despised and hated, and by his surpassing eloquence thrilled and strengthened all anti-slavery hearts, while he overwhelmed all opposition.  JOHN BROWN, Jr., made a characteristic speech, and in a characteristic manner. Much of the quiet of the evening was due to his words and presence.  He made no secret of being in a state of complete preparation for any violence that might be offered.  Every body saw that Mr. BROWN meant just what he said, and seemed to feel that he would translate his words into deeds at the first moment that circumstances might make it necessary to do so.  But we did not take up the subject for details, nor for eulogies of the good men who acted a noble part in opposition to the mob.

The chief thing is to get at its true character, and disclose its relations and bearings on the age and body of the times.  It was an incident small in itself, but vast in its relations and bearings.  It makes a page in the history of the great struggle between liberty and slavery. It shows less what has been accomplished, than what yet remains to be.  It proves that there are men even in Boston--the seat of American learning, and the cradle of American liberty--who are ignorant of, or faithless in, the first principles of American liberty; that they are yet in bondage to the delusion that truth can be put down by persecution; that violence is the remedy for error of opinion; and that sentiment can be subdued
[[/column 2 of 3]]

[[column 3 of 3]]
by force.  They seem not to have learned, with the history and experience of a quarter of a century, that it has been precisely by such mobs that the anti-slavery sentiment has at last been able to break up all old political issues, bring on the 'irrepressible conflict,' overthrow the old political parties, remodel public opinion, change the current of religious influence, make slave-hunting unpopular, and make South Carolina almost mad to get out of the Union.

The contemners of freedom, and the opponents of free institutions will gather fresh strength from this new illustration of American respect for law, and the example of the fidelity of Democratic officers in the execution of law.  They will find it in new proof of our barbarism, and of the fact that men are here governed by the mob rather than by known and established laws.  The friends of freedom everywhere will regret and condemn this new reproach to free institutions, and see in it cause far still greater exertions to enlighten the public mind and improving the public heart with respect to the true principles of human liberty.  No such demonstrations can be permanently injurious, unless the friends of freedom refuse to make the right use of the occasions which they furnish--a neglect not likely to be illustrated in Boston.  Already Governor ANDREWS has made it the subject of pointed rebuke, and WENDELL PHILLIPS has denounced the mob in the presence of four thousand, in Music Hall; and we hear that more general and influential assertion of the sacredness of the right of speech is still to be given in the very face of the gentlemanly mob.

The actors in the disgraceful and scandalous riot must wince under the exposures to which they are being subjected, and feel mortified that they have so signally failed to convert Boston into an echo of Charleston, and to make Massachusetts an appendage of the blood-stained cotton fields of the Carolinas.—-The miserable plot failed, not merely because it was badly managed, nor because its object was bad--for bad causes have their victories as well as good ones--but because the actors in it were insincere.  To serve even a wicked cause successfully, requires something like honest and earnest devotion.  This Boston mob lacked all honest elements.  It was an imposition, a fraud, a sham, lip service, got up for show--a newspaper mob, a show case for Southern windows, a thing of trade, designed to preserve the union of Boston pockets with Southern money.  This is its only significance.  Though the actors in it may hate liberty, they don't love slavery.  They meant to deceive the South by all abounding professions of devotion to slavery; but the South is not green enough to accept such profestions, so that the hypocrites, while well lashed at home, are despised at the South.
[[line]]

--A bold attempt to kidnap a colored boy was thwarted in New York last week. Nothing was done to the kidnappers.
[[/column 3 of 3]]