H[oratio] W. Foster to Frederick Douglass, June 2, 1856

For Frederick Douglass' Paper

LETTE FROM H. W. FOSTER

Providence, June 2d, 1856.

DEAR DOUGLASS :—At a crisis like the present, a fair opportunity is afforded to one of the proscribed class to speak from the depths of his heart that which he thinks, sees, feels, and realizes. Did the manifest indignation which convulses the North at the present moment rise to the height which it should in view of the jeopardy in which our republican liberties are placed by the slave power of the country, I would not ask of you a hearing. You have, of course, posted your readers of the demonstrations South and those North; especially of the resolutions of the Massachusetts Legislature calling upon Congress for redress in behalf of her noble Senator, Hon. Charles Sumner, for the ungodly and most damnable assault upon him by Preston S. Brooks, of South Carolina. Since it has come to this, that anarchy, cowardly, and bloody despotism reigns triumphant in the Senatorial Halls of this Republic, the desperate emergency has called forth an expression of indignation from the people of the North but in no tangible deed or action worthy of freemen and the descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers, which is adequate to the exigencies of the times. If resistance to tyrants is obedience to God, then are the people of the North summoned to meet their foes on the plains of Kansas, and to vanquish the Missourians who invade that soil and the homes of freedmen, to vanquish the Executive Government which backs these ruffians with the U.S. troops. There is no more peace until liberty or slavery has a complete triumph. If a proper expression at the ballot box were made, securing the election of a President who would be faithful and true to the liberties of the North and exercise his influence against slavery—such is the spirit, the policy, and the determination of the South, the military resources of the country would be required to sustain such an administration. Do the people delay the pending conflict until they have elected [the] right Commander-in-Chief? What redress will Massachusetts have in the expulsion of the meanest cowards from the House, when there are fifty or more conspirators in the House and Senate, many of whom looked on silent and inactive, and saw Brooks caneing Mr. Sumner long after he had struck him down senseless? These abettors of slavery and border ruffianism are as ready to concoct another assassination, even more atrocious, upon any representative of Massachusetts or of the other free States as they were in the case of Mr. Sumner. The haughty Southrons will not submit to any ostracization or punishment, however just, for their acts of aggression done with impunity. South Carolina, and the whole

South will regard the expulsion of Brooks from the House for his conduct in the Senate Chamber an indignity vice versa precisely as Massachusetts regards Brooks assault upon Mr. Sumner, and with much more resentment. Whether their subject of abuse be an American citizen or a slave, they are alike regarded by them. They invade a free Territory;—the homes of freemen, the Capitol at Washington, and the glens of Africa, where they kidnap their innocent victims with equal pertinacity and fiendish brutality. Who shall call their ruffianism in Kansas, their kidnapping in the North, or their assassinations in Congress to an account? Who that dares to do it on the floor of the American Capitol tests at once the bullying spirit of the propagandists of slavery. Vituperation, insults, a challenge, conspiracy or assassination are sure consequences, and rewards for a faithful discharge of official duty, free speech, and the advocacy of true republican principles. Intellectual power and moral strength have no weight or influence except in the North; they meet only with bombast, scurrility, and billingsgate from the Southern delegation and the Southern press. The statesman, the scholar, and the philanthropist, such as the Hon. Charles Sumner, is treated with disdain and contempt. His wonderful resource of classic learning, logic, withering sarcasms, are made in jest of by the whole South; in a word, his appeals in behalf of freedom are treaded by them as the pirated treats the captive. Really, the negro-hating prejudiced North, who have trampled upon the free blacks—refusing to ride in the stage coach, in the cars, to set at table with them in the steamboats, and hotels, to allow them equal privileges, or even in the sanctuary of the Most High—in order to keep up a prestige with their Southern masters, are now beginning to feel the smart from the same lash which they have so long been with heartless impunity laying upon the back s of the nominally free colored people. The low regard in which they have been held, and utter significance put upon their character as men and women by the stultified, craven souled apologists of slavery, deserve a far worse fate than Mr. Sumner (whose noble nature never knew so vile a thing as prejudice against color.)—Southern insolence with which Messrs. Hale, Giddings, Wade, Sumner, and other of the North have been regarded on the floor of Congress, forces their identity with the slaves, and with their treatment of free blacks by the North ever since there have been free States. Neither the learning or statesmanship of our ablest representatives can command defference and respect from Southern arrogance; no the good character, education, and civility of manners of the colored people, of which they are capable, can save them from the dark and damning prejudice of the North. A parallel case in point, illustrative of Southern brute force and insolence compared, as identical with Northern prejudice, is shown by the manner in which some of the Northern colorphobeists characterize Samuel R. Ward, distinguished for his power, elocution, and pathos, as an orator. At

the close of one his ablest appeals, before a large audience, some of his Anglo-Saxon hearers, whose mean nature it is to bid for the highest premium for their support of slavery, said he was a "saucy nigger." The superiority of such men as Mr. Ward, whose abilities and noble hatred of all that class of lower white strata North, precisely as the superiority of our Sumners and Sewards excite the universal hatred of the South. That response to Mr. Ward for his speech, in two words, and that of the South to Mr. Sumner, for his last speech, which they denominate a "classic caneing," are responses very like in spirit, if not in deed. In all of these things, does the North not know enough, see enough, and feel enough, to be convinced that it holds no prestige with the South, only by superior numbers and physical strength, and that her only hope to save her god of slavery is in our traitors, our Stephen A. Douglases, our Democratic press, our dough-faces, and in their brute force insolence to intimidate us? It is the only alternative of the South;—then what must be the alternative of the North and the opponents of slavery? How long will it delay the combat?

By the shades of Bunker Hill, of Lexington, and of Concord, and the blood of those patriots who fell upon those consecrated grounds, where is the spirit of the North which animated their fathers; that stirred them to resist the tyrants of the old world—is it dead, dead, dead, or is it yet alive, but so paralyzed by the slave power that it cannot rise again to make resistance, until they actually see Senator Toombs stalking through the now free States; under the protection of law,, to call the roll of his slaves under the monument of Bunker Hill, with the posse comitatus, which he advised the executive to employ in Kansas? From all the enslavement the colonists felt in 1776, under the British yoke, and the patriotism with which their souls were kindled for liberty, have the North no self-respect, no love of liberty, nor dignity to defend?

Will the North desist from defending her equal rights and the principles of the Declaration of Independence because, forsooth, to do so would be to defend also the equal rights of the slave and those of the nominally free colored American, (?) or will the North, with all their resources and superior strength, suffer their liberties to be consumed in their fire of their own direst prejudices, and let the scorpions of the South sting them to death by their own firesides, in their quiet pusillanimity? What else but this internal prejudice, which gangreens the Northern heart and poison her whole social and political organization at every pulsation; and which follows both the salve and free colored population with relentless cruelty at every step, deters the North from engaging at once in the

pending conflict. The conflict will come. The traitors of the North, the administration press may make the whole people pocket many more insults form the South, but they cannot prevent that growing sentiment more powerful than the cataract and whirlwind, which will prostrate every vestige of slavery. The South has declared war a hundred times upon Mr. Sumner, the demonstrations against it in Boston and New York, by the way of resolutions and speeches, are tame and evince none of the spirit of 1776 or of Patrick Henry. Prejudice that lecherous offspring of slavery, the mother of harlots, modified all the speeches and resolutions on the Summer affair, had instead of action, the indignation of the North is spend in words. They know that the struggle involves a complete subjugation of the South, to the government of freedom, and the spread of free institutions over the whole area of slave territory, and that slavery must be wiped out from the land, or the evil and the curse will not be destroyed; so the North is not yet prepared! To consent to a dissolution of the Union, a separation of the North and South, would be a compromise worse than the Missouri Compromise, it would be a "covenant with death, and an agreement with hell." To concede to the South a dominion for their slaves and slaveholding, would be like giving to the thief half of his plunder, after he had taken into the strong hands of justice and law. Such a concession would forever be humiliating to every freeman, and an injustice to four millions of slaves, whose liberties the North have in their power to give them

Most truly yours for liberty,

H. W. FOSTER.