It had really been planned by the Hutchinsons as a concert. The Anti-Slavery Society had asked Mr. Buffum to say a few words. Douglass was merely to be presented and to say that he was glad to be in England. But the newspapers had played up Frederick Douglass’ story so much that at the last moment they decided to seize the opportunity and feature him. When, long before dark the hall began to fill, it was obvious that they had come to hear “the black man.”
While the crowd listened respectfully to the Hutchinsons, Frederick studied his first British audience. Somehow it was different. He realized it bore out what he had witnessed in two days of wandering about Liverpool. For the first time in his life he had seen white people whose lot might well be compared with that of the black slave in America. Here in Liverpool they could indeed leave their jobs, he thought grimly; but their children would starve. He saw them living in unbelievable squalor, several families herded together in two or three rooms, or in a single dirty cellar, sleeping on straw and shavings.
He sat on the platform and studied their faces. There was something in their eyes, something in the stolid set of their chins, something hard and unyielding, some strength which could not be destroyed—something to join with his strength. And so when he rose he did not fumble for words. He told them that he was glad that here on British soil he was truly free, that no slave-hunter could drag him from the platform, no arm, however long, turn him over to a master. Here he stood a free man, among other free men!
They cheered him lustily. And when they had quieted down he began to talk to them about cotton. He talked to them of the cotton piled high on the docks of Liverpool and how it got there. He talked to them of black hands picking cotton and blood soaking into soil around the cotton stalks.
“Because British manufacturers need cotton, American slavery can defy the opinions of the civilized world and block Abolitionists in America and England. If England bought free cotton from some other part of the world, if she stopped buying slave-grown cotton, American slavery would die out.”
Graphically, he added up the horrors of slavery. He told how the labor of the slave in chains cheapened and degraded labor everywhere. They listened, leaning forward in their seats, their eyes fixed.
“Cotton can be grown by free labor, at a fair cost and in far greater abundance, in India. England, as a matter of self-interest as well as on the score of humanity, should without delay redress the wrongs of India, give protection and encouragement to its oppressed and suffering population, and thus obtain a permanent and abundant supply of free cotton produced by free men.”
“A powerful speech, sir!” Nevins reported the next morning.
The Colonial Secretary looked at his man with some impatience.