Rhode Island Meeting

Rhode Island Meeting

[From the Herald of Freedom of Dec. 3, 1841; Miscellaneous Writings, 197-205]

Includes a memorable portrait of Frederick Douglass, and powerful statements of Rogers's radically egalitarian and anti-political opinions.

We resume our account of the general anniversary of the State Society at Providence. Rhode Island, we should think, from our glance of observation, aside from any information we had obtained otherwise, rather a peculiar people. They are, we should say, a freer - more untrammeled, less regulated folk, than the other New Englanders we have known. They are more like David's men in the cave of Adullam, as to hetergeneousness of character. They have not formally bowed down their individuality before the Dagons of party and sect, as the masses have in other States. There is therefore more hope of them. Nothing is so hopeless as orderly subjection to sect. There is sectarianism in the little State - especially in Providence. That Baptist College on the hill, and that steeple that runs up two hundred feet into the sky, at the hill's foot, the pride of Rhode Island's "sacred architecture," are not the only images sectarian idolatry has set up there. The Rev. Dr. Tucker, of the orthodox Congregational order, has got his mosque bedecked with a platoon of pillars in imitation of some heathen temple abroad - and topped out, in smart imitation of the Boston State House, with a real commonwealth dome. The honorable Episcopalians have got an old theatre fitted up into a church. It is a terrible sombre-looking pile. It looks like tragedy, without any comic after-piece to relieve it. Universalism has got a pile as tall as any of them, where they go to persuade themselves out of their superstitions, which nevertheless doubtless continue to haunt them all the while. Their pile looks as sacred and solemn as any of the pagodas. The Unitarians have got an Athenian temple - one of the most beautiful-looking things ever reared to Minerva or Apollo in old Greece. Methodism has got a "where to lay its head" also, though we forget, this moment, whereabouts it thrusts up its steeple - pretty impudently, no doubt, for Methodism does not fear the face of clay, and is determinednot to be behind the grandest; and there they all stand, ensnaring what worshippers they severally may. But in no one of them is a single unqualified principle of christianity ever preached, unless by accident. It would not be tolerated in any of them, unless they differ from all others of their clan. They are consecrated to religious partyism, christianity new organized, and adulterated, and ruined. Were Christ on earth, and to go into any one of them, as He did into the synagogues of old, they would take Him by His seamless coat colar (unless more unceremoniously) and drag him out, as Reverend brother Bouton's Swiss guards dragged Christ's disciple, Stephen S. Foster, out of Old North steeple-house in Concord, a few Sundays ago.[i]

While we are upon the architectural department of Providence, we will just tell our readers of a building or two more. The Arcade, an establishment for traders' and milliners' shops, is one of the nicest structures in the town. It extends from street to street, about two hundred feet in length - lighted overhead, from the sky. A wide, broad aisle through the centre, from end to end, with a row of shops for traders on each side in the lower story, - where vanity may shop it, and gentility lounge or promenade, in all weathers; the upper story retreats, and contains rows of milliners' shops, with a gallery-walk in front, - very pretty, and, we should think, convenient and useful. Splendid rows of granite pillars sustain the gables of the roof at each end, forming two very handsome and imposing fronts. Real granite - not sham, like Doctor Wayland's stone University.[ii] We went, by the way, close up to that Baptist school of the prophets. At a distance, we were struck with its commanding, heavy, solid appearance. But we had had some experience of the character of certain institutions, and so went a little nigher. It still looked ponderous, and very like honest granite. But on perservering inspection, we discerned the dogs' hair and the lime, and it turned out out to be genuine imitation - wood, daubed with untempered mortar, real counterfeit, - and behold, up on the sides of the stone edifice, the mask had peeled off, and disclosed the lathing. Pretty illustrative, thought we, of this whole concern. A specious outside - but hollow and sham within. An ostentatious show of learning, with shallowness and pretension to back it up. Right off in front of its airy common - (it has a real common, one that will remain when the trumpery Institutes are all swept off into the Providence river, at the foot of the hill,) stands the mansion of its Reverend and limited principal, Doctor Francis Wayland, who has set narrower "limits to human responsibilities," a good deal, that he has to his princele abode. We met a poor colored man on the Green, and asked him where Dr. Wayland lived. He disfigured his face, and set down his two baskets, and very reverently pointed it out, and said, as solemn as could be, "There's Doctor Wayland's." The poor fellow said it, as it were, within an inch of his life. It was a solemn sight - a real palace for a rabbi nabob. It was in that house, probably, - in his holy study - with his gown and green spectactles on, that the profound Doctor wrote that spider's web essay, to prove that the people of this country were under no obligation whatever to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia. The way he did it was by curtailing man's "responsibilities" to do his duty. And just so soon as the Doctor got these responsibilities curtailed - docked, "limited"-like, - why, then he proved, as clear as a mud-hole riled by a sow, that tyhe people had no more to do with abolishing their slave-holding than the man in the moon. He demonstrated, with real, shbam, university logic, that they were under no obligation about it, and that the abolitionists were a pack of mad-caps.

There is a great Quaker college up back in the fields, where the broad-brimmed lads are scientifically instructed into the learned mysteries of Goeorge Fox and the New testament. A Quaker now-a-days, we suppose, must be learned, or he will be behind the age. The honor of the denomination must be kept up, and nothing will maintain it but liberal learning. That is the stay and staff of all denominations. The Free Will Baptists and Methodists are thus providing for the respectability of their respective brotherhoods. They must have skill to read thye Testament in the original tongues, to be able to be "wise unto salvation!" If the "Cape Cod Come-outers," as they are called, get numerous, and degenerate into a popular, respectable sect, they will be building theological seminaries on some of the sand hills along the Cape. Learning is "the one thing needful" in religion.

Close by the Quaker college is a Refuge for orphans, or for poor children of some class, built by some horse-leech or other who sucked up the life-blood of their poor dads, and held it in his maw while he lived while he lived, and then - having no further occasion for it, and unable to carry it away with him, but obliged to leave it behind, in Rhode Island, vested it in an atoning Asylum for the children he had helped beggar. We would not disturb the ashes of this poor founder, if he were such a leech - but we would warn all absorbers of the means of human living, not to think of circumventing God, by heaping around them, as long as they live, the means of comfort for a thousand, who must be poor and destitute by the means, - and then, when they can live no longer, pile up some great, ostentatious show of charity for its dispersion, as from his own benevolent fountain. The better way is to let the people have their own as they go along. Their children won't be likely to need an Asylum then.

The Atheneum is a most tasteful, beautiful building, of real stone - planted finely in the side of the hill - overlooking the town. We saw within it Denon's famous work on Egypt, in twenty-five enormous folios - kept in a depot resembling an Egyptian temple covered with Hieroglyphics. It stood in the centre of the grand library and reading room. In another department hung a wonderful picture in Mosaic - of the ruins of Paestum. Temples, Country, Animals and Travelers visiting - all of minute, precious stones, planted end ways in the surface - ground smooth, and polished, with natural colors, surpassing in animation any thing we had ever seen of painting. The picture, some six feet long and two wide, was said to weigh five hundred pounds, and to cost some six thousand dollars, and to contain five millions of stones. It was a picture to the life.

One more edifice, and we hurry to the anti-slavery meeting. It was a "log cabin." Aboriginality - or rather old-settlerism - has had occasion to set up a wigwam in the thick of this populous town. Its patriotic, dignified uses having passed away, and its hard-cider cask converted into a cold-water keg, it is in possession of the reformed drunkards of Providence. Let the same fate speedily befall all other hard-cider cabins in the land. We heard a noble, ranting fellow - one of the lecturers - telling how a Reverend Divine had shut his mouth, off in some of the back towns, because he talked too unsolemnly somehow, for the holy building he was in. May those holy buildings all soon share the uses to which this kindred cabin is now devoted.

We hurry to Franklin Hall. There was Abby Kelley, and Parker Pillsbury, and Frederick Douglass, (the fugitive Othello,) and John A. Collins, and John B. Chandler, and John Pierpont, (a spectator,) and Thomas Davis, and George L. Clarke, and William Aplin, and William Lloyd Garrison, and William adams, and Joseph Sisson, and we don't know how many more. We wish we had not begun to mention them, for we must leave out "five hundred as good as they," as King Harry said of Percy at Chevy Chase.

The meeting looked a good deal free. The President looked like any thing but a gag-master general; and more like a little child, than a tyrant.

The subject of Rhode Island's new constitution draft came up. It seems the little Commonwealth has gone on, ever since the Revolution, without a constitution. She wants one like "the nations round about." Her power of suffrage is in the hands, under her old royal charter, of the landholders. The Constitution proposes to put it in the hands of all the people, with a small personal property qualification, we don't know how much, - small enough to extend the right, it was said, to some fourteen thousand voters. To make it go down with the people, the pitiful creatures inserted a color qualification. They must put in "white" - the color of the gulls you see winging their uncouth flight up and down the harbor, - to shut out three or four hundred colored people, who otherwise might, - when they get money enough, go to the free and equal polls, to choose their masters. The patron of the new Constitution had assumed the name of the "Free Suffrage party." Their freedom showed itself in making a man's hue the test of his rights. They felt free to enslave a man if he was not white as a diaper. One or two of their demagogues came into the meeting. One was a Dr. Brown, a steam doctor, whose political morality seemed about as high as that of a railroad engine with a Jim Crow car to it; or a church with a "nigger pew." A vote was early passed declaring the meeting open to all speakers and voters. The Doctor gave us an expose of his white ethics. It seemed he wanted to get suffrage for the white folks, in order, by and by to extend it to the black. It reminded us of the fable of the fox and goat in the well. they had fallen into one - that was dry, but too deep to jump out of. Renard being a little selfish, and a trifle sly, proposed to the goat a mode of getting both out. You rear up on your hind legs, says he, and plant your horns firmly against the stoning of the well, and I will leap up on to your head and horns, and spring from thence on to the brink of the well, and being out myself, will contrive then to get you out also, - whereas here, you know, I can do nothing at all to help you. The goat thought it stood to reason, and having great confidence in Esquire Fox's honesty, complied with his proposal, and made her head his stepping stone. The fox leaped out and escaped; but losing all solicitude for his late companion in affliction, uttered some proverb to the goat about trusting Foxes - shook his brush at her from the well's brink, and scamperd off, leaving her to her meditations. We think the "Free Suffrage" party want to make a stepping stone - a goat's head and horns - of the colored people and abolitionists; and after they get enfranchised, they would shake a fox's tail in their faces.

But the illustration is wanting in one particular. This lack of suffrage is not like being down in the well; and getting it, would not have any tendency to help the colored people out. It would prove a worthless boon in their hands. The white folks would not acknowledge them as equals if they were nominally voters. They never would consent to their being candidates for any thing - they would treat them as "niggers" still.

The colored people and their friends should never consent to such a constitution, but scout it with utter contempt. Our counsel to them would be to pay it little attention, except as an occasion to push the livelier the grand warfare against the pro-slavery bulwark of this country. The abolition of slavery by the power of free principles, is the only consummation that can avail to yield the colored man a single right or privilege.

The "free suffrage" Doctor fell into the merciless hands of Garrison, who tore him limb from limb. We never saw so tremendous a triumph of morals over political profligacy. We again lament the lack of reporters in our meetings. Some of the richest flowers of human speech, the rarest buds of eloquence, and the noblest sentiments are lost to the world in our anti-slavery meetings. The world is not there to hear them, and abolitionists can't remember them. They are too common for them to remember. They multiply in every meeting. They abound in almost every anti-slavery speech - for it comes from the depths of the heart, and when the heart speaks, it is eloquent. It is the head that fails when it attempts them. Hearts talk at the anti-slavery meetings.

Friday evening was chiefly occupied by colored speakers. The fugitive Douglass was up when we entered. This is an extraordinary man. He was cut out for a hero. In a rising for Libert, he would have been a Toussaint or a Hamilton. He has the "heart to conceive, the head to contrive, and the hand to execute." A commanding person - over six feet, we should say, in height, and of most manly proportions. His head would strike a phrenologist amid a sea of them in Exeter Hall, and his voice would ring like a trumpet in the field. Let the South congratulate herself that he is a fugitive. It would not have been safe for her if he had remained about the plantations a year or two longer. Douglass is his fugitive name. He did not wear it in slavery. Why don't know why he assumed it, or who bestowed it on him - but there seems a fitness in it, to his commanding figure and heroic port. As a speaker he has few equals. It is not declamation - but oratory, power of debate. He watches the tide of discussion with the eye of the veteran, and dashes into it at once with all the tact of the forum or the bar. He has wit, argument, sarcasm, pathos - all that first-rate men show in their master efforts. His voice is highly melodious and rich, and his enunciation quite elegant, and yet he has been but two or three years out of the house of bondage. We noticed that he had strikingly improved, since we heard him at Dover in September. We say thus much of him, for he is esteemed by our multitude as of an inferior race. We should like to see him before any New England legislature or bar, and let him feel the freedom of the anti-slavery meeting, and see what would become of his inferiority. Yet he is a thing, in American estimate. He is the chattel of some pale-faced tyrant. How his owner would cower and shiver to hear him thunder in an anti-slavery hall! How he would shrink away, with his infernal whip, from his flaming eye when kindled with anti-slavery emotion. And the brotherhood of thieves, the posse comitatus of divines, we wish a hecatomb or two of the proudest and flintiest of them, were obliged to hear him thunder for human liberty, and lay the enslavement of his people at their doors. They would tremble like Belshazzar. Poor Wayland! we wish he could have been pegged to a seat in the Franklin Hall, the eveing the colored friends spoke. His "limitations" would have abandoned him like the "baseless fabric of a vision."

Sanderson of New Bedford, Cole of Boston, and Stanley of Noth Carolina, followed Douglass. They all displayed excellent ability. Sanderson and Stanley's peaking [was] of a high order. Stanley was a young man, apparently about two and twenty - exceedingly black - an elegant figure, rather daintily dressed. He will dress less, as he frequents free meetings, and experiences the treatment of a man. He announced his name, when called for by the chair, and his place - "not Stanley of Congress," he added, with unaffected disdain and dignity - which drew him a storm of welcome from the meeting. We had had a "Douglass," from the names at Flodden Field, and now we have a "stanley;" and as he was mounting the platform, we could hardly refrain from greeting him with an "On, Stanley, on!"

"he was not the Congress Stanley," he repeated, "nor would he stoop to rank himself with the Wises or the Bynums of the South;" and if he did not surpass the Virginia debater in "excellency of speech or man's wisdom," he was truer far to humanity and liberty, and he acquitted himself in a speech of some thirty or forty minutes to very great acceptance, and closed with periods that, in a young debutant at Washington, would have won the gratulations of the old hackneyed authorities in politics and debate.

Those were the inferior race. These the young black men, who, ten years ago, would have ben denied enrance into such an assembly of whites, except as waiters or fiddlers. their attempts at speaking would have been met with jeers of astonishment. It would have amazed the superior race as the ass's speech did Balaam. Now they mingle with applause in the debates with Garrison and Foster and Phillips. Southern slavery - "hold thine own!" - when the kindred of your victims are this kindling northern enthusiasm on the platform of liberty and free debate!

We are summoned away to a discussion meeting at Chichester, appointed by Reverend Rufus A. Putnam, new-organized Congregational clergyman of that place - and must break off here, and accompany Parker Pillsbury on a night jaunt thither, with prospect of a return under the midnight moon. But we go for humanity - so "cheerily O, cheerily O." Anti-slavery will keep us warm and wide awake amid the "nipping and eager" breath of winter and "witching time o'night."