Communipaw [James McCune Smith] to Frederick Douglass, August 8, 1858

LETTER FROM COMMUNIPAW.

MR. EDITOR:—It is not without diffidence that I hazard another letter on the "apathy" problem, especially as I must criticize a Pennsylvanian about his statements and views of the "colored history" of Pennsylvania.

In your issue of July 2nd, Wm. Whipper says in substance—

1st. The friends of the free blacks, Woolman, Benezet, the Friends, Franklin, Rush, Wistar, down to the most modern type of philanthropists, have urged them (the blacks) to practice the cardinal virtues, and labor to obtain education, property and good morals, as a means of obtaining the rights and privileges which white men enjoy on the soil of Pennsylvania.

2d. That the free blacks have followed this advice in Pennsylvania, and have been successful in obtaining praiseworthy excellence in education, morals and religion.

3d. But the whites of Pennsylvania, instead of crowning the moral, intellectual and spiritual excellence of their black fellow-citizens by enlarging their privileges, have crucified them (the blacks) by curtailing their privileges in civil and political matters.

4th. And as a deduction from these facts, Mr. Whipper affirms that the blacks in Pennsylvania may obtain the rights and privileges they have lost—

a. Either by a change in white men's minds;

b. Or a change in black men's skins;

c. Or by a return, on the part of the blacks, to the degraded state in morals, education, &c., which they occupied (say) half a century ago.

The free blacks of Pennsylvania, on the adoption of its first constitution as a State, and until some twenty years ago, had

1. The right hold and convey real estate—and have it still;

2. The right of census—and have it still;

3. The right of intermarriage with whites—and have it still;

4. The right to be elected to office; (?)

5. The right to vote, of which they were deprived by a juggle, in the new constitution;

6. The right to minister in sacred things—and have it still;

7. The right to sue in the United States Court —and have it still;

8. The right of a citizen's passport—and have it still;

9. The right of oath in a court of Justice—and have it still.

If there be any other rights and privileges, to which white men are entitled on the soil of Pennsylvania, I do not know them; all these rights, or any one of them, constitution citizenship in Pennsylvania, or any other State where citizenship is not especially defined.

Of all these rights, the blacks of Pennsylvania were deprived of the right to vote by the act of the Constitutional Convention, who were juggled into that act, by being industriously shown through—not the parlors of the moral and cultivated free blacks of Philadelphia—but the lowest haunts and dens of vice and filth presented by the worst class of Philadelphia free blacks.

The blacks of Pennsylvania, therefore, have been deprived of only one right, in consequence of the moral degradation of a few, not the moral excellence of the many.

I am informed, on good authority, that during the many years the black Pennsylvanians had the right to vote, the free blacks out in the country did vote; the free blacks of the city of Philadelphia did not vote; and when my friend Wm. Whipper was a younger and bolder man than he is now, he, with others, arranged a case to put forward a colored voter in Philadelphia, and, in case of his rejection, to appeal to law to maintain his right; but some older heads, busily engaged in following the advice of Shipley, rush, &c., especially that part which says "put money in they purse," dissuaded him, and he missed the chance of a triumph such as Beckley had in Ohio. (See Fred'ck Douglass' Paper, July 2, 1858.)

If these things be true, then the historical accuracy, and the philosophic views of William Whipper are alike shaken.

There is a view of this subject which Mr. Whipper would do well to consider. In this land, more and more has the world of politics isolated itself, until it has now a plane of its own, endowed with an alphabet, an arithmetic,

a priesthood, and a moral basis all its own—a plane as wide apart as the poles, from either sound religion or good morals; and no man, nor men can succeed, nor get a foothold in the political world, without first giving himself up soul and body to its creed and its priesthood.

Now, then, the blacks of Pennsylvania have kept (if we except half a dozen prettily written "appeals"—risum teneatis!) steadily aloof from its political atmosphere. They have labored in matters of religion, money making, education, good morals, temperance, &c. They have succeeded where they have labored, and have failed where they have neglected to labor. A man be he white or black, can no more succeed in politics by cultivating good morals, than he can succeed in oratory by studying algebra. In our own State of New York, Gerrit Smith is moral, benevolent, good—as any black man on the face of the earth—and yet he, a white man though he be, must fail as a politician; look at the last Syracuse Convention.

I will go a step further. Had the Pennsylvania blacks really desired political rights, they might have obtained them. If the Pennsylvania blacks really desire the right to vote in that State, they can obtain it now. Of this I feel positive. Let the Stephen Smiths, the Whippers, the Pecks, the Purvises, the Wears, and others, make a "solomn league and covenant" to obtain the right to vote in Pennsylvania, and they will obtain it. Let them take as a basis the influence they already hold as men of business and standing with their follow-citizens; let them put down half a million, or even a million of dollars, wherewith to buy up the Legislature, the judiciary, and the political wire pullers, and use their means discreetly, and within two or three years they will be able to march to the polls escorted by the (political) bone and sinew of the Key Stone State. Let William Whipper, instead of crying to Jupiter to send "an unwritten miracle," just put his broad shoulder to this wheel, and it will move—move more easily and steadily than the "wheel within a wheel," which looks to "nationality" for the blacks in Canada, Yoruba, or—the moon!

But woe is me! I fear that the moral sense of some of the brethren I have named in Pennsylvania will rise up in rebellion against the above suggestions; their pure souls would not

be stained with the dirty business of bribery and corruption even for the right to vote! The same moral sense, which is transcendant tenuity, crucified Frederick Douglass when he left Garrisonism for Liberty Party; which turned up its sainted nose when he shouted for Fremont; and which will go into hysterics when he hurras for Seward in 1860!

William Whipper is right, therefore, when he says that moral degradation on the part of the blacks must be the price of their regaining their political standing in Pennsylvania. But he is wrong if he means to assert that this is demanded of them because, they are black; for it is the price of political achievement to all men in Pennsylvania be they white or black. How much moral excellence, what sense of justice what regard for common truth or common honesty is left adherent to the poor old man, the highest product of the Pennsylvania political plane, whom men call the President of the United States?

Another word and I am done. It is high time that men like William Whipper should look at our case with the scrutiny of a philosopher, and direct it within the energy of a re former. And his first step must be to understand it thoroughly and state it plainly. Instead of repeating the popular cry about our degradadation, he should ask, are we, in the light of historic truth, degraded? I claim that my black brethren in Pennsylvania are not degraded. They are for the present deprived of the franchise of voting, but have all other franchises; and moreover they have, par excellence, the moral character of the State in their keeping; the moral sense of Pennsylvania could receive no such shock from the act of any white man, as would smite it down in shame, if William Whipper committed a forgery, or John Peck dealt in kidnapping, or Stephen Smith made a fraudulent assignment! And which is the most precious, the most elevated charges which can be entrusted to a portion of the people of Pennsylvania—its ballot box, or its moral sense? The one governed by the fleeting breath of popular applause, the other the cable which moors it fast to the footstool of the Almighty? And this thing is true, not only of blacks in Pennsylvania, but of blacks all over this Union.—The organ of the Democratic political party—

(the Democratic Review)—alas no longer distinguished as the negro-hating party! in seeking all over the land for an example to prove the excellence of a beneficent reform, could find no higher example of a triumph at once in morals and religion, than Black Jacob, spared from the gallows in the State of N. Y. The Black Law of California, I am assured, on best authority, was arrested in its passage by the threatened migration of the blacks thence to Vancouver's Island; the white gold hunters did not like to part with their moral sense and their religion, which they instinctively felt to be contained in their black brethren.

Let us, therefore, change our war cry. If we are morally elevated, let us say so. Let us cheer one another on our elevation; let us infuse some good moral sense into the mass of our white brethren; they need it sadly; and altho' it may be distant, "le jour viendra!" the day will come, when some black man, on the grounds of his moral excellence, will be marched into the Capitol at Harrisburgh, and at Washington, a welcome and equal legislator in the council of the State or Nation. It cannot be so long a fight, and surely will be more glorious than that which has just terminated by the admission of a Rothschild into the British House of Commons.

Yours,

COMMUNIPAW.

NEW YORK, August 8th, 1858.