Collect Day #28, FREDERICK DOUGLASS IN NEW HAMPSHIRE
Almighty God, we bless your Name for the witness of Frederick Douglass, whose impassioned and reasonable speech moved the hearts of people to a deeper obedience to Christ even as was “warned out” of many towns in New Hampshire: Strengthen us also to speak on behalf of those in captivity and tribulation, continuing in the Word of Jesus Christ our Liberator; who with you and the Holy Spirit dwells in glory everlasting. Amen
DAY #28, March 17, 2018
Pittsfield
FREDERICK DOUGLASS IN NEW HAMPSHIRE
(c. 1818–1895)
J Dennis Robinson
In the final version of his autobiography, published not long before his death in 1895, Frederick Douglass recalled an early visit to New Hampshire. Now America’s best-known abolitionist, Douglass was just 25 during his first encounter with citizens of the Granite State. Twenty-one of those years had been spent enslaved.
He bore on his back the marks of the lash, and he likely revealed this fact to his White audience in Pittsfield, NH, in 1842. He knew White audiences did not want to hear the horrific details of life as a slave, but he told them all the same.
“I’m afraid you do not understand the awful character of these lashes,” Douglass said politely. He explained how an enslaved man could be stripped naked, tied to a tree or post and – for the smallest of infractions — lashed with a knotted whip almost to the bone.
A Black woman who taught her child to read was hanged, he said. There were 71 crimes for which a Black could be executed, Douglass noted, yet only three capital crimes for Whites. As he spoke to the Pittsfield congregation, Douglass himself was a fugitive and still enslaved. He had escaped his Maryland owner to marry a free Black woman named Anne Murray.
During a morning intermission in the Pittsfield service, no one in the congregation spoke to Douglass. At lunch no one spoke to him or offered him a meal. Rejected from a local hotel, cold, hungry and despondent, Douglass sat in a small cemetery. Only the New Hampshire dead, Douglass wrote, welcomed him.
America was in the thick of its gruesome Civil War when Douglass arrived in Portsmouth two decades later March 15, 1862. His own sons were soldiers. He spoke this time at the 1,000-seat Portsmouth Lyceum in a converted church known as The Temple on the site of today’s Music Hall. By this time Douglass was a free man, well known for his fiery impassioned rhetoric, as publisher of the anti-slavery North Star newspaper, and as a confidante of President Abraham Lincoln.
This time the local papers trumpeted Douglass’ arrival. A display ad in the Portsmouth Daily Morning Chronicle announced the evening lecture by “The Eloquent Champion of Freedom.” Slavery, like indentured servitude, Douglass reminded his many 19th century audiences, was initially about cheap labor, not race. Many nations and races practiced slavery, he explained. But in America, as the nation evolved, successful businessmen became addicted to slavery, even as slavery became identified with skin color. The addiction to criminally cheap labor was hard to break, and as history shows us every day, the scars of racism have yet to heal.
Copyright J. Dennis Robinson. All rights reserved.
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