“Thus Saith the Lord”: Frederick Douglass Quotes the Famous Saying of Anti-Slavery Martyr John Brown

The only example of this signed quotation we have ever seen

Frederick Douglass first met John Brown in 1847, and initially viewed the visionary abolitionist with a combination of admiration and ambivalence. Brown was a man of action, and his militancy and violence against slavery greatly influenced Douglass’s own evolving radicalism in the 1850s. However, the secrecy and strategic ineptness of the Brown’s actions in Bleeding Kansas left Douglass wary, and had a major impact at the moment of truth when Brown all but begged him to join the Harpers Ferry raid.

In late January 1858, Brown arrived at Douglass’s home in Rochester, New York, and stayed for a month. Living those winter days secluded in an upstairs room, Brown composed his “provisional constitution” for the state of Virginia, which he hoped to overthrow with his raid on the Federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. It is likely that Brown told his host more details about his revolutionary plans than perhaps Douglass ever admitted. But Douglass, who indeed hoped that Brown’s scheme might foment a successful assault on slavery, never found Brown’s plans, nor his leadership, convincing. Douglass did not attend Brown’s convention in Chatham, Ontario, on May 8, 1858, where Brown tried to recruit blacks to his cause. Douglass twice met Hugh Forbes, an Englishman whom Brown hired as his military strategist, when the soldier of fortune passed through Rochester in 1857–1858. Here again, Douglass was much intrigued with these clandestine plotters against slavery, but he found Forbes to be unreliable with both money and personal trust. John Brown and his plans were rays of hope and fascination, but it was hard to expect they would lead to a signal success.

In early fall 1859, as Brown made final preparations for his raid, Douglass, driven by curiosity and hope, paid a visit to Brown in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. They met secretly in an old stone quarry, Douglass was accompanied by a fugitive slave named Shields Green, whom he had brought along as a possible recruit for Brown’s band. They sat down on large rocks and discussed Brown’s plans. Brown beseeched Douglass to join his rather small band of willing warriors. “I want you for a special purpose,” Douglass remembered Brown saying to him. “When I strike, the bees will begin to swarm, and I want you to help hive them.” Douglass was dismayed; he had earlier understood that Brown really intended to liberate slaves in Virginia and funnel them into hideaways in the Appalachian Mountains. Now, Brown appeared obsessed with attacking the Federal arsenal, a desperate mistake in Douglass’s judgment. Douglass told Brown that he was “going into a perfect steel trap, and that once in he would not get out alive.” Douglass said no to Brown’s pleas, but let Shields Green decide his own fate. According to Douglass, Green said “I b’leve I’ll go wid de ole man”; he would die at Harpers Ferry.

Meanwhile, Douglass headed north to anxiously await word of what was to come. News of an attack on October 16, 1859, against the Federal arsenal at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers by Brown’s band of abolitionists electrified the nation. Among the documents seized from Brown in the wake of his arrest was a brief letter from Douglass written in 1857. Thus, Douglass could be construed by outraged Virginians to have been a co-conspirator in Brown’s criminal deeds. Douglass was in Philadelphia lecturing as news came of the raid, and he hastily took the train home to Rochester. If caught and sent to Virginia, he assumed that he would be killed “for my being Frederick Douglass.” In the dark of night on October 22, with a warrant out for his arrest and Federal marshals soon to arrive in his upstate New York hometown, Douglass took a ferry across Lake Ontario, the same route on which he had himself ushered many a runaway slave. Anxious and without options, he sailed for England in early November on a lecture trip he had already planned, but not under these circumstances. He had been convicted of treason, murder, and inciting slave insurrection. In a letter written just two days before the dramatic hanging of Brown in a field outside Charlestown, Virginia, on December 2, 1859, addressed to a woman who had raised money to help Douglass launch his abolition newspaper, the North Star, Douglass defended the course of both himself and Brown, calling the latter “that brave and I believe good man.”

One of Brown’s men, captured and jailed, denounced Douglass in the press for allegedly abandoning his promises to join the raid. Under this cloud of suspicion, Douglass, living in England, felt compelled to defend himself against both the accusations of treason by Virginians and of betrayal by his friends. He wrote a public letter in which he declared that he “never made a promise” to join the raid and that the “taking of Harpers Ferry was a measure never encouraged by my word or by my vote…My field of labor for the abolition of slavery has not extended to an attack on the United States Arsenal.” But as he made a case for his legal innocence, he also declared himself very much John Brown’s moral ally.

Brown died to bring freedom to the enslaved, died for what was right, and with his execution, he became a martyr and his name a rallying cry. Douglass was himself affected by this sentiment. “I am ever ready to write, speak, publish, organize, combine, and even to conspire against slavery,” said Douglass, “when there is a reasonable hope of success. Men who live by robbing their fellow-men of their labor and liberty have…voluntarily placed themselves beyond the laws of justice and honor, and have become only fitted for companionship with thieves and pirates.” Douglass wanted it widely known that he objected only to Brown’s particular means and tactics, not his ultimate ends or his justification.

As the election year of 1860 intensified, the U.S. government ceased its pursuit of Brown’s alleged accomplices. Douglass came back to a nation on the brink of disunion. In his personal arsenal of rhetorical weapons against slavery, and soon the Confederacy, would always be John Brown and his body. Hard to love in life, Brown was of enormous value in death. Douglass saw Brown’s enduring worth to the cause of black freedom, and he never ceased to eulogize the martyr, the classical hero, whose sacrifice made his gallows as sacred as the Christian cross.

In an 1881 speech at Storer College, in Harpers Ferry, Douglass declared that the hour of Brown’s “defeat was the hour of his triumph,” his “capture” the “victory of his life.” As though remembering his own ambivalence about Brown’s plans in 1859, but also the power of his symbol in the wake of the execution, Douglass summed up the old warrior’s significance. “With the Allegheny mountains for his pulpit, the country for his church and the whole civilized world for his audience,” announced Douglass, “he was a thousand times more effective as a preacher than as a warrior.” Brown had used revolutionary violence, however ineptly, to foment a larger revolution in America. For that, Douglass would forever honor him as the greatest abolitionist hero. At some of Douglass’s speeches recruiting black soldiers during 1863, he would break into the popular song “John Brown’s Body,” singing as he called young men forward in the fight to destroy slavery.

Douglass was fond of one particular saying of Brown’s, one that Brown used to justify his actions on the grounds that God mandated them. Douglass famously quoted it in the Storer College speech and published it under the title “John Brown: A Speech by Frederick Douglass”. Autograph quotation signed, 1875. “Whenever there is a right thing to be done, there is a ‘Thus saith the Lord’ that it shall be done.”

This is the only signed example of this extraordinary quotation that we have ever seen in all our decades in this field.