LETTER

FROM WENDELL PHILLIPS, ESQ.

BOSTON, APRIL 22, 1845.

My Dear Friend:

You remember the old fable of "The Man and

the Lion," where the lion complained that he should

not be so misrepresented "when the lions wrote his-

tory."

I am glad the time has come when the "lions

write history." We have been left long enough to

gather the character of slavery from the involuntary

evidence of the masters. One might, indeed, rest

sufficiently satisfied with what, it is evident, must

be, in general, the results of such a relation, with-

out seeking farther to find whether they have fol-

lowed in every instance. Indeed, those who stare at

the half-peck of corn a week, and love to count the

lashes on the slave's back, are seldom the "stuff" out

of which reformers and abolitionists are to be made.

I remember that, in 1838, many were waiting for

the results of the West India experiment, before

they could come into our ranks. Those "results" have

come long ago; but, alas! few of that number have

come with them, as converts. A man must be dis-

posed to judge of emancipation by other tests than

whether it has increased the produce of sugar,—and

to hate slavery for other reasons than because it

starves men and whips women,—before he is ready

to lay the first stone of his anti-slavery life.

I was glad to learn, in your story, how early the

most neglected of God's children waken to a sense

of their rights, and of the injustice done them. Ex-

perience is a keen teacher; and long before you had

mastered your A B C, or knew where the "white

sails" of the Chesapeake were bound, you began, I

see, to gauge the wretchedness of the slave, not by

his hunger and want, not by his lashes and toil, but

by the cruel and blighting death which gathers over

his soul.

In connection with this, there is one circumstance

which makes your recollections peculiarly valuable,

and renders your early insight the more remarkable.

You come from that part of the country where we

are told slavery appears with its fairest features. Let

us hear, then, what it is at its best estate—gaze on

its bright side, if it has one; and then imagination

may task her powers to add dark lines to the picture,

as she travels southward to that (for the colored

man) Valley of the Shadow of Death, where the

Mississippi sweeps along.

Again, we have known you long, and can put the

most entire confidence in your truth, candor, and

sincerity. Every one who has heard you speak has

felt, and, I am confident, every one who reads your

book will feel, persuaded that you give them a fair

specimen of the whole truth. No one-sided portrait,

—no wholesale complaints,—but strict justice done,

whenever individual kindliness has neutralized, for

a moment, the deadly system with which it was

strangely allied. You have been with us, too, some

years, and can fairly compare the twilight of rights,

which your race enjoy at the North, with that "noon

of night" under which they labor south of Mason

and Dixon's line. Tell us whether, after all, the half-

free colored man of Massachusetts is worse off than

the pampered slave of the rice swamps!

In reading your life, no one can say that we have

unfairly picked out some rare specimens of cruelty.

We know that the bitter drops, which even you have

drained from the cup, are no incidental aggravations,

no individual ills, but such as must mingle always

and necessarily in the lot of every slave. They are the

essential ingredients, not the occasional results, of

the system.

After all, I shall read your book with trembling

for you. Some years ago, when you were beginning

to tell me your real name and birthplace, you may

remember I stopped you, and preferred to remain

ignorant of all. With the exception of a vague de-

scription, so I continued, till the other day, when

you read me your memoirs. I hardly knew, at the

time, whether to thank you or not for the sight of

them, when I reflected that it was still dangerous,

in Massachusetts, for honest men to tell their names!

They say the fathers, in 1776, signed the Declaration

of Independence with the halter about their necks.

You, too, publish your declaration of freedom with

danger compassing you around. In all the broad lands

which the Constitution of the United States over-

shadows, there is no single spot,—however narrow or

desolate,—where a fugitive slave can plant himself

and say, "I am safe." The whole armory of North-

ern Law has no shield for you. I am free to say that,

in your place, I should throw the MS. into the fire.

You, perhaps, may tell your story in safety, en-

deared as you are to so many warm hearts by rare

gifts, and a still rarer devotion of them to the service

of others. But it will be owing only to your labors,

and the fearless efforts of those who, trampling the

laws and Constitution of the country under their

feet, are determined that they will "hide the out-

cast," and that their hearths shall be, spite of the

law, an asylum for the oppressed, if, some time or

other, the humblest may stand in our streets, and

bear witness in safety against the cruelties of which

he has been the victim.

Yet it is sad to think, that these very throbbing

hearts which welcome your story, and form your best

safeguard in telling it, are all beating contrary to the

"statute in such case made and provided." Go on,

my dear friend, till you, and those who, like you,

have been saved, so as by fire, from the dark prison-

house, shall stereotype these free, illegal pulses into

statutes; and New England, cutting loose from a

blood-stained Union, shall glory in being the house

of refuge for the oppressed,—till we no longer merely

"~hide~ the outcast," or make a merit of standing idly

by while he is hunted in our midst; but, consecrat-

ing anew the soil of the Pilgrims as an asylum for the

oppressed, proclaim our WELCOME to the slave so

loudly, that the tones shall reach every hut in the

Carolinas, and make the broken-hearted bondman

leap up at the thought of old Massachusetts.

God speed the day!

~Till then, and ever,~

~Yours truly,~

~WENDELL PHILLIPS~