## Decoration Day.

### Address of Frederick Douglass at Franklin Square.

From the Rochester Union and Advertiser, (Democratic) May 30, 1839.

The following is a verbatim report of the Decoration Day address delivered by Frederick Douglass, at Franklin Square this afternoon:

Friends and Fellow-Citizens:-- If anything like pride or self-gratulation were permissible or pardonable in any man, on an occasion like this, I might be excused for entertaining some such feeling in view of the invitation to appear here as your orator to-day. In your estimation and in mine, and in the estimation of loyal men generally, especially in the loyal North, the annual memorial occasions have a deep and sacred significance. They stand as a sign of something real, valuable and important. He who is deemed worthy to participate in them, be he ever so humble and his part ever so limited, may well enough feel himself exalted. It is more than ribbons, or stars, or garters. It makes a man as one of the American people, a man among men, a full partaker in the rights, duties, privileges and immunities of American citizenship-- a citizenship having a grander future than any bestowed by any other country in the world.

While the prominent position you have assigned me to-day confers higher honor and greater distinction than any promised by the circumstances of my early life, and while I consented to come here, only after a severe controversy with my distrust and my sense of inability to bring forward anything outside the beaten track of memorial addresses, and while to gather up in due form the noble sentiments, thoughts and aspirations suggested and inspired by this memorial anniversary, and to give them appropriate voice and expression, is a task to which men far abler than myself might feel unequal, I am nevertheless, for many reasons, very glad to be here, and to bear the honorable part to which you have been pleased to call me.

With all the drawbacks which oppress me at this moment, I never-

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theless feel that I have a decided and manifest advantage. Though not
to the manor born, I am, happily for me, no stranger in the city of
Rochester. My acquaintance with the people of this city is not re-
cent. It dates back full forty years. I came here quite a young man,
and, like many other young men, was more confident of my knowledge,
wisdom and ability then, than I am to-day. Though at that time only
a few years from the hard school of Southern bondage, I came among you
to plead the cause of enslaved millions, and to teach the rights and
duties of human brotherhood and American citizenship. Your grand
University, with its learned President and professors, had not then
shed its lustre upon the name of Rochester. Like myself, your splen-
did city was in its youth. The fine, umbrageous trees in Washington
Square were then small, and then your population was less than one-half
its present number. Chicken Row, with its dilapidated wooden shanties
was still a marked feature of one of your finest streets. Architect-
ure had not then given you the magnificent edifices which have since
risen so grandly around you. The old Court House, grandfather to the
present one, was still standing. The Eagle Hotel had not given place
to that admirable and striking structure known as the Powers Building.
In a word, your now splendid city was then only rising to the posses-
sion of that wealth, culture, beauty and power, which now give it rank
among the most desirable cities on the American continent.

Fellow-citizens, I congratulate myself, and I congratulate you,
upon the fact, that amid all the prosperity and glory in which you
stand, and notwithstanding all the changes wrought in the externals
of your city, I find here in Rochester to-day the same enlightened,
liberal and independent spirit by which it was distinguished forty
years ago.

While indulging in reminiscences, and while I am, perhaps, speak-
ing to many of a new generation, I may say that the best twenty-five
years of my life were spent in Rochester. Friendships were formed

during that residence among you, which not even the iron hand of Time
can break. Common pleasures have their bonds of union, and they are
strong, but common pain and suffering have bonds of fellowship even
stronger and more lasting. Those that bind me here are of this latter
class. I was with you, and suffered with you, in the hour of danger
and profound anxiety, and a common suffering has made us friends. I
was with you when a great national affliction and the stern logic of
events made your cause mine and my cause yours, and it was here, for
the first time, I had the happiness to feel myself under the protection
of the national flag.

Fellow-citizens-- Though I have not participated with you personally, upon occasions like this, my peculiar experience, together with that common interest and common memory which makes this day sacred to all of us, I have in spirit united with you in its observance.

No people in the United States, so far as I know, perform the
rites and ceremonies which belong to this day, more scrupulously,
appropriately and impressively, than do the people of Rochester; and
from my recollection of your experience of the clouds, darkness and
blood attending the war, when gloom filled your homes, and sorrow sat
at your hearthstones, no people have better reason so to perform these
rights and ceremonies.

The patriotism this day honors found not its birth but its expression in that momentous struggle. It was seen that the accumulation of wealth, and the ease and luxury which such accumulation brought, had not destroyed the heroic spirit of the days that tried men's souls. I seem even now to feel the effects of the sights and the sounds of that dreadful period. I see the flags from windows and housetops fluttering in the breeze. I see and hear the steady tramp of armed men in blue uniforms through all your streets. I see the recruiting sergeant with drum and fife, with banner and badge, calling for men, young men and strong, to go to the front and fill up the gaps made by

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rebel powder and pestilence. I hear the piercing sound of trumpets
that told us plainly peace had taken its flight from our borders; that
our country was divided and involved in the turmoils of a terrible war.

Fellow-citizens, I am not here to flatter, unless truth itself be
flattery, but I do like to say pleasant things when I can say them
truthfully, and this I can say of you, your patriotism during all that
great trial was, according to my observation, equal to the occasion.
Though you felt the common gloom you were not cowed by defeat nor made
careless or over-confident by victory. Your zeal and your courage
burned with steady flame alike amidst the gusts and calms of the war.

What Rochester was at the beginning of the war, that Rochester was
during the war and at the end of the war. As an eye witness I am here
to say that though there were croakers here as elsewhere during all
that momentous struggle, her courage never quailed, her mind never
doubted, her enthusiasm never cooled, her purse never closed, her arm
never wearied.

Fellow-citizens: In the name of your country, and in behalf of
emancipated millions, and in my own behalf, I am here to thank you and
to thank your brave soldiers, and to thank your able statesmen, to
thank the living and the dead, for their fidelity to principle, their
patriotic fervor, and for what they attempted, suffered and accomplished.
The fact to which we to-day invite the attention of loyal
and patriotic men, in every part of our country, is that we are still
upon duty, and that we do not forget our patriotic dead. We call
attention to the fact that within the sacred enclosure of Mt. Hope, a
place well named, and well suited to the solemn purpose to which it is
devoted, a ground hallowed by affection, adorned by art, beautified by
wealth, skill and industry, coupled with holiest memories, where strong
men go to meditate and widows and orphans go to weep, we have met to
strew choice flowers, with lavish, loyal, loving hands, upon the green

graves of our brave young men, who, in the hour of national peril,
went forth and nobly gave their lives, all that men can give, to save
their country from dismemberment and ruin. Does any man question the
right or the propriety of this annual ceremony? Can any man who
loves his country advise its discontinuance? Is there anywhere
another altar better than this, around which the nation can meet one
day in each year to renew its national vows and manifest its loyal
devotion to the principles of our free government? Is there any emi-
nence from which we can better survey the past, the present, the fu-
ture? For my part I know of no other such day. There is none other
so abundant in suggestions and themes of immediate national interests
as this day. In saying this I am not unaware that the world is full
of anachronisms, empty form and superstitions, kept above ground and
upon exhibition by hollow, heartless and unthinking custom; things that
wear the appearance of life while destitute of its power and have
little or no relation to the generations now living.

I am not only aware of this fact, but I am also aware that the
time may come when this national Decoration Day, which means so much to
us, shall share the fate of other great days. Having answered the end
of its ordination it will fa de and vanish, and it will be given to
some other day more nearly allied with the wants and events of another
age. So let it be. Everything is beautiful in its season. Let not
the smoke survive the candle.

When an institution has answered the end for which it was created,
it should follow the order of nature and disappear. Here as elsewhere
there is no pause, no stopping place. There have been many plans and
policies proposed in the interests of what is called conservation, but
the combined wisdom of all the ages has not yet devised any means to
guard and guarantee the world against mutations in human society, or
revolutions in the structure of human government.

The law of change is everywhere vindicated. What has happened once may happen again. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, and we may console ourselves in the thought that whatever may be the immediate or distant future, whatever may hallow another day, and make it great in the eyes of the American people, for the present at least, there is no national holiday which contains so much for the head and heart of our day and generation as this Decoration Day. We may say of it as Daniel Webster once said of Bunker Hill Monument: "It looks, it speaks, it acts." It recalls to us with the emphasis of the roar of a thousand cannon, the scenes and incidents of a tremendous war. It is full of lessons of wisdom, courage and patriotism. It may, as I have said, lose its hold on the attention of the people and cease to be observed, but the broad and manly sentiment of which it is born, and by which it is sustained, will live, flourish and bear similar fruit forever.

While good and evil, loyalty and treason, liberty and slavery, remain opposites and irreconcilable, while they retain their fighting qualities, and shall contend, as they must contend, for ascendency in the world, their respective forces will adopt opposite emblems and tokens.

Fellow-citizens:-- Two very conflicting sentiments and policies have been expressed and espoused in respect of our duty towards the people lately in rebellion. One of these would regard and treat the Southern people precisely as they would regard and treat them had they been always loyal and true to the government. It is said that this cruel war is over, that the late rebels have repented their folly and have accepted in good faith the results of the late war, and that now, we should forget and forgive the past, and turn our attention entirely to the future. Even that moral and intellectual giant in the councils of the nation, the late Charles Sumner, would have had all our battle flags banished from view, and nothing left to tell that there had ever

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been trouble in our national family. Much in the same line were the
views and sentiments of the late Horace Greeley, Gerritt Smith, Chief
Justice Chase and other eminent men.

Opposed to this view of our national duty it is held that the
rebellion is suppressed but not conquered; that its spirit is still
abroad and only waits to reassert itself in flagrant disloyalty.

Though the doctrine of forgiveness and forgetfulness has been
adopted by many of the noblest and most intelligent men of our country,
men for whom I have the highest respect, I am wholly unable to accept
it, to the extent to which it is asserted. I certainly cannot accept
it to the extent of abandoning the observance of Decoration Day. If
rebellion was wrong and loyalty right, if slavery was wrong and emanci-
pation right, we are rightfully here to-day.

We are not here to fan the flames of sectional animosity, not to
revive the malign sentiments which naturally sprung up in the heat and
fire of a bloody conflict. We are not here to visit upon the chil-
dren the sins of the fathers, but we are here to remember the causes,
the incidents, and the results of the late rebellion. We come around
this national family altar, one day in each year, to pay our grateful
homage to the memory of brave men-- to express and emphasize by speech
and pageantry our reverence for those great qualities of enlightened
and exalted human nature, which in every land are the stay and salvation
of the race; the qualities without which states would perish, society
dissolve, progress become impossible and mankind sink back into a
howling wilderness of barbarism. In a word, we are here to reassert
and reproclaim our admiration for the patriotic zeal, the stern forti-
tude, the noble self-sacrifice, the unflinching determination, the
quenchless enthusiasm, the high and measureless courage with which
loyal men, true to the Republic in the hour of supreme peril, dashed
themselves against a wanton, wicked and gigantic rebellion, and

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suppressed it beyond the power to rise again.

I base my views of the propriety of this occasion not upon parti-
san, partial and temporary considerations, but upon the broad founda-
tions of human nature itself. Man is neither wood nor stone. He is
described by the great poet, as a being looking before and after. He
has a past, present and future. To eliminate either is a violation
of his nature and an infringement upon his dignity. He is a progres-
sive being, and memory, reason and reflection, are the resources of his
improvement. With these perfections, everything in the world, every
great event has an alphabet, a picture, a voice to instruct. He

"Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything."

For him every foot of bird or beast leaves its imprint upon the
earth, every wheel of cart or carriage leaves its track upon the road,
every keel of ship or schooner leaves its wake in the seamless ocean,
to tell the mariner where he has deviated from his true course. If
these may be consulted for the purposes of knowledge and wisdom, how
much more the course of our rebellion-tossed ship of state, freighted
with all that is precious in human hope and human existence.

I am, then, for remembering the past, for only out of the mists
and shadows of the past may the thoughtful statesman read, with some
degree of certainty, the probable events of the future.

But even here in this broad domain of memory, reason, experience
and reflection, upon which man moves so grandly and so like a god, he
is still a circumscribed and limited being. He can only travel so
far. The ocean is large, but it has its bounds beyond which it may
not pass. The same is the case with man. The strongest memory gives
him at last only a vague, confused and imperfect impression of the
facts and experiences of the past. He at last sees men in that direc-
tion only as trees walking.

In the fierce battle for existence, little time is left to most

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of us for events long gone by. We live and must live in the hurry
and tumult of the passing hour.

Now, when to these considerations, we add the natural weakness of
all human powers, the dullness of observation, the imperfection of
memory, the fading effect produced by time and distance, upon all that
happens in the world, it is easily seen that man is followed and must
be followed by a cloud of oblivion almost as dark and impenetrable as
to the things of the past, as that dark curtain or cloud which conceals
from the present the mighty events which are awaiting the world in the
distant future.

Hence, from natural causes, we are likely to take along with us
too little, rather than too much of the past, and may forget too soon,
rather than remember too long, the tremendous facts of the late war.
At any rate, no special effort is needed to efface from memory the
record of the past, or to conceal from our children the bitter experi-
ences of their fathers. They are a part of our national history and
worthy of special observation, thought and study.

The motto that tells us not to speak naught but good of the dead,
does not apply here. Death has no power to change moral qualities.
What was bad before the war and during the war, has not been made good
since the war. Besides, though the rebellion is dead, though slavery
is dead, both the rebellion and slavery have left behind influences
which will remain with us, it may be, for generations to come.

Rapid indeed is the march of time. We are already fast getting
far away from the days of rebellion and slavery. Men are already
losing adequate comprehension of the stupendous wickedness of both.
The generations coming after us who shall look only into our Declara-
tion of Independence and our Constitution for a knowledge of our char-
acter as a nation, will find it hard to believe that a part of the
people professing to believe in the principles of those great charters

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of liberty, could fall from their high estate, reject the creed of
their fathers, become traitors to their country, and wage cruel and
unrelenting war upon their loyal brothers during four long years, for
no other purpose in the world than to propagate, maintain and perpet-
uate a system of slavery, the most cruel and savage and debasing upon
which the sun ever looked down.

Many disguises have been assumed by the South in regard to that
war. It has been said that it was fighting for independence, but the
South was already a sharer in the national independence. It has been
said that the South was fighting for liberty, but the South was already
a sharer in the national liberty. It has been said that the South was
fighting for the right to govern itself, but the South had already the
ballot and the right to govern itself. What more could it want?
What more did it want?

If we would know the answer to these inquiries we have only to
read the utterances of Alexander H. Stephens, the Vice President of the
Southern Confederacy, the clearest headed statesman on that side of the
question. From him we shall learn that the great and all-commanding
object for which the South withdrew from the Senate to the field,
appealed from the deliberations of reason to the arbitrament of the
sword, from debate to bayonets, from the ballot to the battle field,
was to found and erect a government based upon the idea of a privileged
class, of inequality of natural rights, and of the righfulness of
slavery. They have found their main-spring and power among the lowly.
But here was a rebellion, not for freedom, but for slavery; not to
break fetters, but to forge them; not to secure the blessings of liber-
ty, but to bind with chains millions of the human race. It was not
from the low, but from the high; not from the plebeian, but from the
patrician; not from the oppressed, but from the oppressor.

For this, and only for this, we lost millions of treasure and

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rivers of blood. For this, and only for this, the beautiful South was
made desolate, the nation weighed down under a debt heavier than a
mountain of gold, and half a million of our sons and brothers swept
into bloody graves.

Fellow-citizens:-- I am not indifferent to the claims of a generous forgetfulness, but whatever else I may forget, I shall never forget the difference between those who fought for liberty and those who fought for slavery; those who fought to save the Republic, and those who fought to destroy it.

We are sometimes asked, "What was gained by the suppression of
this slave-holding rebellion, and whether it is worth what it cost?"
It had perhaps better be asked, what we should have lost had we failed
to suppress the rebellion? In what condition would this country be
with the lower half of the Mississippi in the hands of a foreign and
hostile power? Who can paint the horrors of wars and incursions which
would have reddened the line running east and west, separating two
governments, one based upon Liberty and Equality, and the other upon
Slavery and race inferiority? Would not the raw edges of such a line
be always chafing and bleeding? Heavy as has been the cost of the
war, would not a heavier one have fallen upon the country had the war
failed?

Fellow-citizens:-- You lament, I lament, and we all lament the
war forced upon us by the propagandists of slavery and caste. Your
hearts ache in the contemplation of its dreadful hardships and horrors,
for war here, as elsewhere, was a vast and terrible calamity.

But to estimate properly what was lost and what was gained, a more
comprehensive generalization than present space will permit is required.

If the existence of society is more than the lives of individual
men; if all history proves that no great addition has ever been made to
the liberties of mankind, except through war; if the progress of the
human race has been disputed by force and it has only succeeded by

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is not reasonable to suppose that peace and amity would spring up between us under separate governments, based upon diametrically opposite principles. To us the suppression of the rebellion means peace, nationality, liberty and progress. It means the everlasting exclusion from the entire borders of the Republic that system of barbarism which gave birth to the rebellion, a system which branded our Declaration of Independence as a lie, our civilization as a sham, our religion as a mockery, and made our name a byword and a hissing among all the nations of the earth.

In a speech delivered recently in the city of New Orleans, Mr. Jefferson Davis made the following statement:--

"As for me-- I speak only for myself-- our cause was so just, so sacred, that, had I known all that has come to pass, had I known what was to be inflicted upon me, all that my country was to suffer, all that our posterity was to endure, I would do it over and over again."

When we see sentiments like these emanating from Southern men and rapurously applauded by admiring assemblies of the people we may well enough keep in mind the principles and benefits which we sought to sustain, and did sustain, in our contest with that slave-holding rebellion.

But what of the emancipated class? How stands the case with them to-day? Has liberty been a blessing or a curse? Has their freedom been a credit or a calamity to them? I admit that on the surface there are some reasons for asking these questions; but plainly enough they are superficial reasons and are derived from shallow and imperfect reflection.

Unquestionably, the condition of the fredman is not what it ought to be, but the cause of their affliction is not to be found in their present freedom, but in their former slavery. It does not belong to the present, but to the past. They were emancipated under unfavorable conditions. They were literally turned loose, hungry and naked, to the open sky. They had neither home, friends nor money. Such was

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their destitution at the start, that their enemies consoled themselves with the thought that hunger and exposure would soon thin them out, and possibly destroy them altogether. Those who now carp at their destitution, and speak of them with contempt, should judge them leniently, and measure their progress, not from the heights to which they may in time attain, but from the depths from which they have come. They have perished neither from cold nor hunger, and from the last United States census we learn that their increase is ten per cent greater than that of the native white population of the South.

Twenty-five years ago, no child of these people was permitted to attend school and learn to read; now there are two hundred thousand of these children attending school. The time would fail me to tell of the various efforts now being made to improve the condition of the emancipated class, and to place them within the range of an equal chance in the race of life, and to tell you how the opportunities now afforded them are embraced, appreciated and improved.

While, as most of you know, my whole life has been devoted to the work of abolishing slavery, and to the further work of making a favorable impression for the colored race, on the minds of the American people, when freedom came to the enslaved in the sudden and startling manner in which it did come, I was oppressed with serious doubts and fears that they might in some way in the intoxication of their new freedom, damage their cause and invite destruction. The transition from slavery to freedom, from political degradation to political equality, from abject dependence to personal responsibility and self-reliance, is seldom made without suffering. What has happened in the West Indies, What has happened in Russia, was naturally expected to happen here. But, happily for us, the trouble here has not been so great as in either of the countries named.

For one, I am not so much surprised by the short-comings of the

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emancipated race, as by their successes; I do not despair, no man should despair of a people whom neither slavery nor freedom can kill. No man should despair of a race, that, in the face of a prejudice and a hate, more active, intense and bitter, than ever assailed California Chinamen, border Indians, or Russian Jew, has risen from the ashes of utter destitution, and increased its numbers ten per cent beyond that of people in the most favored condition.

On an occasion like this, it should not be forgotten that these emancipated people, who are often so harshly criticised, were the only friends the loyal nation had in the South during the war. They were eyes to our blind, legs to our lame, guides to our wounded and escaping prisoners, and often supplied information to our generals, which prevented the slaughter of thousands. It should also not be forgotten that, when permitted to do so, they enrolled themselves as soldiers of the Republic, and did their duty like brave men. They did not suppress your rebellion, but they did help you to suppress it.

Fellow-citizens:-- My sympathies are not limited by my relation to any race. I can take no part in oppressing and persecuting any variety of the human family. Whether in Russia, Germany or California, my sympathy is with the oppressed, be he Chinaman or Hebrew. I have no sympathy with that narrow, selfish notion of economy which assumes that every crumb of bread which goes into the mouths of one class, is so much taken from the mouths of another class, and hence, I cannot join with those who would drive the Chinaman from our borders.

Fellow-citizens, In conclusion, I would bring you back to what I consider grand and sacred local duty, and that is, the erection here in Rochester of some monument of bronze, marble or granite, which shall commemorate to after-coming generations, the unfaltering courage, the unswerving fidelity, the heroic self-sacrifice, of your sons and brothers, during the late war. Rochester is a luminous point in Western

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New York, and is seen alike by the lakes and by the ocean. It is fit
and proper that she should have a monument to the virtues developed in
her in the momentous crisis wherein was involved the life and death,
the salvation and destruction of the Republic. This monument, symmet-
rical and beautiful, would be a just tribute to the dead, and a noble
inspiration to the living. It would stand before your people mute but
eloquent-- a sacred object around which your children and your chil-
dren's children could rally, and draw high inspiration of patriotism
and self-sacrifice by studying the deeds of their fathers, which saved
their country to peace, to union and to liberty.

The applause was frequent throughout the delivery of this spirited
address, which lacked none of the ardor of Mr. Douglass's public efforts
of former years.