Page:Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892).djvu/314

306 story. The Rev. Samuel Hanson Cox, D. D., of Brooklyn, N. Y., was especially disturbed at my presence and speech in the Temperance Convention. I will give here, first, the reverend gentleman's version of the occasion in a letter from him as it appeared in the New York Evangelist, the organ of his denomination. After a description of the place (Covent Garden theatre) and the speakers, he says:

"They all advocated the same cause, showed a glorious unity of thought and feeling, and the effect was constantly raised—the moral scene was superb and glorious—when Frederick Douglass, the colored abolition agitator and ultraist, came to the platform and so spake, à la mode, as to ruin the influence almost of all that preceded! He lugged in anti-slavery, or abolition, no doubt prompted to it by some of the politic ones who can use him to do what they would not themselves adventure to do in person. He is supposed to have been well paid for the abomination. "What a perversion, an abuse, an iniquity against the law of reciprocal righteousness, to call thousands together and get them, some certain ones, to seem conspicuous and devoted for one sole and grand object, and then all at once, with obliquity, open an avalanche on them for some imputed evil or monstrosity, for which, whatever be the wound or injury inflicted, they were both too fatigued and hurried with surprise, and too straightened for time, to be properly prepared. I say it is a streak of meanness. It it abominable. On this occasion Mr. Douglass allowed himself to denounce America and all its temperance societies together as a grinding community of the enemies of his people; said evil with no alloy of good concerning the whole of us; was perfectly indiscriminate in his severities; talked of the American delegates and to them as if he had been our schoolmaster and we his docile and devoted pupils; and launched his revengeful missiles at our country without one palliative, and as if not a Christian or a true anti-slavery man lived in the whole of the United States. The fact is, the man has been petted and flattered and used and paid by certain abolitionists, not unknown to us, of the ne plus ultra stamp, till he forgets himself, and though he may gratify his own impulses and those of old Adam in others, yet I am sure that all this is just the way to ruin his own influence, to defeat his own object, and to do mischief, not good, to the very cause he professes to love. With the single exception of one cold-hearted parricide, whose character I abhor, and whom I will not name, and who has, I fear, no feeling of true patriotism or piety