Frederick Douglass, “The Pro-Slavery Mob and the Pro-Slavery Ministry” (1861)

(image: “Expulsion of Negroes and Abolitionists from Tremont Temple, Boston, Massachusetts, on December 3, 1860,” Harpers Weekly, December 15, 1860).

Frederick Douglass

In December 1860 and January 1861, mobs had shut down multiple anti-slavery meetings in the North. Douglass himself had been in attendance at a in Boston, December 3, 1860, in honor of John Brown, until a mob broke up the meeting and they were forced to move to another venue. In January 1861, Samuel May, a Unitarian pastor, had a meeting shut down in Syracuse, New York, and then the mob burned him in effigy at the town square. But in addition to mobs, several pro-slavery sermons and articles had also been published in December and January, by Presbyterians like James Boylan Shaw, Henry Van Dyke, and James Henley Thornwell, as well as Episcopal bishop John Henry Hopkins.

Frederick Douglass connected the two, and blasted away at both in a remarkable article published in the March 1861 issue of his Douglass Monthly, titled “The Pro-Slavery Mob and the Pro-Slavery Ministry” (original available here).

“In great Perils of our Lives”: George Whitefield and Stono Rebellion of 1739

George Whitefield

It was late at night on Wednesday, January 2, 1740, in colonial South Carolina. George Whitefield and a small party were trying find their way to “a Gentleman’s House, where we had been recommended” but they missed their turn in the dark, and decided to keep on going, “trusting to the Almighty.” Soon after they saw a light, but when they went up to it, they found “a Hutt full of Negroes.” One of Whitefield’s friends figured they might be “some of those who lately had made an Insurrection in this Province, and were run away from their masters.” Whitefield and company rushed off (“thought it best to mend our Pace”), but soon came upon another fire, and imagined another “Nest of such Negroes” so they went off the road through the woods to avoid them. Whitefield and his friends were terrified, believing they were “in great Perils of our Lives”(A Continuation of the Reverend Mr. Whitefield’s Journal, from His Embarking After the Embargo, to His Arrival at Savannah in Georgia, 78–79).

Why was Whitefield so afraid? What was the “Insurrection” he was referring to? How does this help us situate Whitefield in the racial landscape of colonial America at the time?