The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [176]
‘A man! A man!’ the audience roared back as one voice.
‘Shall such a man be held a slave in a Christian land?’ called out Garrison.
‘No! No!’ shouted the audience.
And even louder, Garrison asked: ‘Shall such a man ever be sent back to bondage from the free soil of Old Massachusetts?’
And now the crowd was on its feet, crying out ‘No! No! No!’
He never did return to slavery. Instead, as an author, editor and publisher of journals, as a speaker in America and abroad, and as the first African-American to occupy a high advisory position in the US government, he spent the rest of his life fighting for human rights. During the Civil War, he was a consultant to President Lincoln. Douglass successfully advocated the arming of ex-slaves to fight for the North, Federal retaliation against Confederate prisoners-of-war for Confederate summary execution of captured African-American soldiers, and freedom for the slaves as a principal objective of the war.
Many of his opinions were scathing, and ill-designed to win him friends in high places:
I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the South is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes - a justifier of the most appalling barbarity, a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds, and a dark shelter under which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection. Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me ... I ... hate the corrupt, slavehold-ing, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.
Compared to some of the religiously inspired racist rhetoric of that time and later, Douglass’s comments do not seem hyperbolic. ‘Slavery is of God’ they used to say in antebellum times. As one of many loathsome post-Civil War examples, Charles Carroll’s The Negro a Beast (American Book and Bible House) taught its pious readers that ‘the Bible and Divine Revelation, as well as reason, all teach that the Negro is not human’. In more modern times, some racists still reject the plain testimony written in the DNA that all the races are not only human but nearly indistinguishable with appeals to the Bible as an ‘impregnable bulwark’ against even examining the evidence.
It is worth noting, though, that much of the abolitionist ferment arose out of Christian, especially Quaker, communities of the North; that the traditional black Southern Christian churches played a key role in the historic American civil rights struggle of the 1960s; and that many of its leaders -most notably Martin Luther King, Jr. - were ministers ordained in those churches. Douglass addressed the white community in these words:
[Slavery] fetters your progress, it is the enemy of improvement; the deadly foe of education; it fosters pride; it breeds indolence; it promotes vice; it shelters crime; it is a curse of the earth that supports it, and yet you cling to it as if it were the sheet anchor of all your hopes.
In 1843, on a speaking tour of Ireland shortly before the potato famine, he was moved by the dire poverty there to write home to Garrison: ‘I see much here to remind me of my former condition, and I confess I should be ashamed to lift my voice against American slavery, but that I know the cause of humanity is one the world over.’ He was outspoken in opposition to the policy of extermination of the Native Americans. And in 1848, at the Seneca Falls Convention, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton* had the nerve to call for an effort to secure the vote for women, he was the only man of any ethnic group to stand in support.
[* Years later, she wrote of the