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MARCH, 1862    DOUGLASS' MONTHLY     615.

you have left other men, to do with and for themselves.  We would be entirely respectful to those who raise the inquiry, and yet it is hard not to say to them just what they would say to us, if we manifested a like concern for them, and that is; please to mind your business, and leave us to mind ours.  If we cannot stand up, then let us fall down.– 
We ask nothing at the hands of the American people but simple justice, and an equal chance to live;  and if we cannot live and flourish on such terms, our case should be referred to the Author of our existence.  Injustice, oppression, and Slavery with their manifold concomitants have been tried with us during a period of more than two hundred years.  Under the whole heavens you will find no parallel to the wrongs we have endured.  We have worked without wages;  we have lived without hope, wept without sympathy, and bled without mercy.  Now, in the name of a common humanity, and according to the laws of the Living God, we simply ask the right to bear the responsibility of our own existence.

Let us alone.  Do nothing with us, for us or by us as a particular class.  What you have done with us thus far has only worked to our disadvantage.  We now simply ask to be allowed to do for ourselves.  I submit that there is nothing unreasonable or unnatural in all this request.  The black man is said to be unfortunate.  He is so.  But I affirm that the broadest and bitterest of the black man's misfortunes is the fact that he is everywhere regarded and treated as an exception to the principles and maxims which apply to other men, and that nothing short of the extension of those principles to him can satisfy any honest advocate of his claims.

Even those who are sincerely desirous to serve us and to help us out of our difficulties, stand in doubt of us and fear that we could not stand the application of the rules which they freely apply to all other people. 
Now, whence comes this doubt and fear?  I will tell you.  There is no difficulty whatever in giving ample and satisfactory explanation of the source of this estimate of the black man's capacity.

What have been his condition and circumstances for more than two centuries?  These will explain all. 
Take any race you please, French, English, Irish, or Scotch, subject them to slavery for ages – regard and treat them everwhere, every way, as property, as having no rights which other men are required to respect.– Let them be loaded with chains, scarred with the whip, branded with hot irons, sold in the market, kept in ignorance, by force of law and by common usage, and I venture to say that the same doubt would spring up concerning either of them, which now confronts the negro.  The common talk of the streets on this subject shows great ignorance.  It assumes that no other race has ever been enslaved or could be held in slavery, and the fact that the black man submits to that condition is often cited as a proof of original and permanent inferiority, and of the fitness of the black man only for that condition.  Just this is the argument of the Confederate States;  the argument of Stephens in defense of the S. C.  But what are the facts?  I believe it will not be denied that the Anglo-Saxons are a fine race of men, and have done something for the civilization of mankind, yet who does not know that this now grand and leading race was in bondage and abject slavery for ages upon their own native soil.  They were not stolen away from their own country in small numbers, where they could make no resistance to their enslavers, but were enslaved in their own country.

Turn to the pages of the history of the Norman Conquest, by Monsieur Thierry, and you will find this statement fully attested.– He says:  Foreigners visiting England, even so late as the sixteenth century, were astonished at the great number of serfs they beheld, and the excessive harshness of their servitude.  The word bondage, in the Norman tongue, expressed at that time all that was most wretched in the condition of humanity.

He again says: About the year 1381, all who were called bonds in English or in Anglo-Norman – that is, all the cultivators of land – were serfs in body and goods, obliged to pay heavy aids for the small portions of land which served them to feed their families, and were not at liberty to give up that portion of land without the consent of the Lords for whom they were obliged to do gratuitously, their tillage, their gardening, and their carriage of all kinds.  The Lords could sell them, together with their horses, their oxen, and their implements of husbandry – their children and their posterity – which in the English deeds was expressed in the following manner:  Know that I have sold––, my knave, and all his offspring, born or to be born.

Sir Walter Scott, after describing very minutely the dress of a Saxon serf, says:  One part of the dress only remains, but it is too remarkable to be suppressed.  It was a brass ring resembling a dog's collar, but without any opening, and soldered fast around the neck, so loose as to form no impediment to breathing, and yet so tight as to be incapable of being removed excepting by the use of the file.  On this singular gorget was engraved, in Saxon letters, an inscription of the following purport;  Gurth, the son of Beowulph, is the born thrall of Cedric Rotherwood.

As an evidence of the contempt and degradation in which the Saxons were held, Monsieur Thierry says that after the conquest the Bishop of Lincoln reckoned only two languages in England – Latin for men of letters and French for the ignorant, in which language he himself wrote pious books for the use of the French, making no account of the English language and those who spoke it.

The poets of the same period, even those of English birth, composed all their verses in French when they wished to derive from them either profit or honor.  Such is a brief view of the social condition occupied for ages by a people now the mightiest on the globe.  The Saxon was of no account then;  the negro is of no account now.  May not history one day carry the analogy a step further?  In the case of the Saxon, we have a people held in abject slavery, upon their own native soil by strangers and foreigners.  Their very language made no account of, and themselves wearing brass collars on their necks like dogs, bearing the names of their masters.  They were brought and sold like the beast of the field, and their offspring born and to be born doomed to the same wretched condition.  No doubt that the people of this now proud and grand race in their then abject condition were compelled to listen to disparagement and insults from their Norman oppressors, as galling as those which meet the black man here.  No doubt that these disparagements hung about their necks like a mountain weight to keep them down, and no doubt there were men of shallow brain and selfish hearts to tell that Slavery was their normal condition.

The misfortunes of my own race in this respect are not singular.  They have happened to all nations, when under the heel of oppression.  Whenever and wherever any particular variety of the human family have been enslaved by another, their enslavers and oppressors, in every such instance, have found their best apology for their own base conduct in the bad character of their victims.  The cunning, the deceit, the indolence, and the manifold vices and crimes, which naturally grow out of the condition of Slavery, are generally charged as inherent characteristics of the oppressed and enslaved race.  The Jews, the Indians, the Saxons and the ancient Britons, have all had a taste of this bitter experience.

When the United States coveted a part of Mexico, and sought to wrest from that sister Republic her coveted domain, some of you remember how our presses teemed from day to day with charges of Mexican inferiority.– How they were assailed as a worn-out race;  how they were denounced as a weak, worthless indolent, and turbulent nation, given up to the sway of animal passions, totally incapable of self-government, and how excellent a thing we were told it would be for civilization if the strong beneficent arm of the Anglo-Saxon could be extended over them;  and how, with our usual blending of piety with plunder, we justified our avarice by appeals to the hand-writing of Divine Providence.  All this, I say, you remember, for the facts are but little more than a dozen years old.

As between us and unfortunate Mexico, so it was with Russia and the Ottoman Empire.  In the eyes of Nicholas, the Turk was the sick man of Europe – just as the negro is now the sick man of America.

So, too, in former years, it was with England and Ireland.  When any new burden was sought to be imposed upon that ill-fated country, or when any improvement in the condition of its people was suggested, and pressed by philanthropic and liberal statesmen, the occasion never failed to call forth the most angry and disparaging arguments and assaults upon the Irish race.t

Necessity is said o be the plea of tyrants.  The alleged inferiority of the oppressed is also the plea of tyrants.  The effect upon those against whom it is directed is to smite them as with the hand of death.  Under its paralyzing touch all manly aspirations and self-reliance die out and the smitten race comes almost to assent to the justice of their own degradation.

No wonder, therefore, that the colored people in America appear stupid, helpless and degraded.  The wonder is rather that they evince so much spirit and manhood as they do.  What have they not suffered and endured?  They have been weighed, measured, marked and prized – in detail and in the aggregate.  Their estimated value a little while ago was twenty hundred millions.  Those twenty hundred millions of dollars have all the effect of twenty hundred millions of arguments against the negro as a man and a brother.  here we have a mountain of gold, depending upon the continuance of our enslavement and degradation.  No wonder that it has been able to bribe the press against us.– No wonder that it has been able to employ learning and eloquence against us.  No wonder that it has bought up the American pulpit and obtained the sanction of religion against us.  No wonder that it has turned every department of the Government into engines of oppression and tyranny toward us.–  No nation, however gifted by nature, could hope to bear up under such oppressive weights.

But to return.  What shall be done with the four million slaves, if emancipated.  I answer, deal justly by them;  pay them honest wages for honest work;  dispense with the biting lash, and pay them the ready cash;  awaken a new class of motives in them remove those old motives of shriveling fear of punishment which benumb and degrade the soul, and supplant them by the higher and better motives of hope, of self-respect, of honor, and of personal responsibility.  Reverse the whole current of feeling in regard to them.  They have been compelled hitherto to regard the white man as a cruel, selfish, and remorseless tyrant, thirsting for wealth, greedy of gain, and caring nothing as to the means by which he obtains it  Now, let him see that the white man has a nobler and better side to his character, and he will love, honor, esteem the white man.

But it is said that the black man is naturally indolent, and that he will not work without a master.  I know that this is a part of his bad reputation;  but I also know that he is indebted for this bad reputation to the most indolent and lazy of all the American people, the slaveholders – men who live in absolute idleness, and eat their daily bread in the briny sweat of other men's faces.  That the black man in Slavery shirks labor – aims to do as little as he can, and to do that little in the most slovenly manner – only proves that he is a man.  Thackeray says that all men are about as lazy as they can afford to be – and I do not claim that the negro is an 

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