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We are here again to congratulate our brethren of the British West Indies upon their peaceful disenthrallment, and to tender them the assurance that we the oppressed, and our friends in the United States generally, watch with the deepest interest their career in the new life upon which they have entered.
We are here to acknowledge and manifest our gratitude to God, the giver of every good and perfect gift , for the merciful deliv-ance of that people. We are here, too, to bless the memory of the noble men, through whose wise, unwearied, and disinterested labors this grand result was wrought out, and to hold up their pure and generous example for admiration and imitation throughout the world.
But above all our profoundest wish, our interested desire, our chiefest aim, is to make this ever memorable day in some small measure the means of awakening a deeper interest in the cause of the fettered millions in our own land.
We think nothing unreasonable to ask the citizens of this Republic to be as true to liberty, to be as just, as generous, and as Christian like all the subjects of the British Monarchy have shown themselves to be in this great act of Emancipation.
How long may we ask, shall it be the standing reproach and shame of the American Government that while England is exerting it's mighty power, and her all-pervading influence, to emancipate mankind from Slavery, and to humanize the world, the American government is taxing it's ingenuity, and putting forth it's power, to thwart and circumvent this policy of a great and kindred nation?
Only a few weeks ago the American people were placed in a most disgraceful and revolting position. We were made the patrons of pirates, the protectors of the vilest band of robbers and murders which the sea ever floated-.
-I mean the slave traders of the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and fifty-eight.
Our Government virtually gave notice not merely to slave trader, but to all manner of sea pirates that the American flag is broad enough to cover them all, and that the American arm is strong enough to defend them all.
Mr. Buchanan virtually gave notice to all the Spanish, American and Portuguese stealers of men that they have only to run up the Stars and Stripes, when pursued by an honest man-of-war, to be safe from pursuit.
The American flag would shield them, if loaded to the gunwales with human flesh for Cuba and Texas.
Talk about the laws of nations - talk about the freedom of the seas the rights of of independent nations! Who does not know that this is all a refuge of lies? Who believes that our opposition to the exercise of the right of visit by England arises mainly out of our respect for our he law of nations, or our regard for the freedom of the seas?
Who is there so dull in the discernment of motives of State, as not to know that the real explanation of our belligerent assertion of the freedom of the seas - our opposition to the right of visit, is that England is an Anti-Slavery nation while we are a slave holding and slave-trading nation?
But for this, the men-of-we of both nations would move as fraternally to the Gulf of Mexico to put down the Slave-trade, as the Niagara and Agamemnon proceeded to the middle of the Atlantic to lay down the electric wire. A slave holding Government cannot consistently oppose the Slave-trade; it is the logical and legitimate deduction of Slavery and the one is as hateful as the other. They are twin monsters, both hatched in the same polluted nest.
Slavery and the Slave trade together constitute what the pure-minded and pious- hearted John Wesley denominated the sum of all villainies.
But to return. I rejoice to see before me white people as well as colored people to-day; for though this is our day peculiarly, it is not our day exclusively.
The great truths we here recognize, the great facts we here exhibit, and the great principles which truth and fact alike establish, are world-wide in their application, and belong to no color, class or clime. They are the common property of the whole human family.
The complaint is, you are aware, that certain great estates which were once prosperous and flourishing, have greatly declined since the abolition of Slavery.
I do not dispute the fact; all, or nearly all that is alleged at this point, may be freely admitted, but I deny that the failure of these estates proves emancipation to be a failure. On the contrary, they prove that a new order of thing adapted to a state of freedom is indispensable to the growth and prosperity of these Islands. It is no proof that the people of Egypt are not as well off now as they were in the days of the Pharaohs, because no more pyramids are seen rising to meet the Eastern sky.
It is no proof that the people of England are not as well off now as they were in the feudal ages, because huge castles with towers and turrets, walls and battlements, are not seen rising in different parts of the British Islands.
It is no proof either that Britain is declining because most of those old piles, belonging to a semi barbarous age are fast crumbling to ruin. So neither is it any proof that the West Indies are declining because the old plantation system of other days is giving place to small farms as is the case in Jamaica and elsewhere.
Description
Signer Diego Guerra performs an excerpt of Frederick Douglass' speech, "Freedom in the West Indies"
Duration
8 minutes, 12 seconds
Credit
Ploeger ASL Interpreting, LLC/NPS
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