The American Churches are Full of Blood: An Address Delivered in Princeton, Massachusetts on February 1, 1843

The American Churches are Full of Blood: An Address Delivered in Princeton, Massachusetts on February 1, 1843

As an agent of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, Douglass attended and spoke at the annual meeting of the Worcester County North Division Anti-Slavery Society on 1-2 February 1843 held in the Baptist Meeting House in Princeton, Massachusetts. Boston Liberator, 10 March 1843.

F. Douglass introduced the following resolution:

Resolved, That the hands of the American church are full of blood, and that she is not, while she continues thus, what she assumes to be, the heaven-appointed instrumentality for reforming the world.^{1Douglass is expressing the abolitionist belief that most American religious denominations provided moral sanction to slavery by welcoming enslavers to the membership and communion tables. John R. McKivigan, The War against Proslavery Religion: Abolitionism and the Northern Churches (Ithaca, N.Y., 1984), 18-35.}

Mr. Douglass said, that the idea suggested in the resolution was not original with him, but was drawn from holy writ. He introduced the remarks, not because he liked to deal harshly with any, but because he believed it to be true, and the truth of which he would prove by facts of the most conclusive character. * * * He also proved the instrumentality of the church in the support of this great evil, exhibiting the pit of slavery where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth; ‘Rachel weeping for her children because they are not.’^{2A paraphrase of Jer. 15:31.} He pointed to the priest, who, with his deacons, (no allusion to the Mr. President,^{3The Boston Liberator of 10 March 1844 reported that Deacon Joshua Titus Everett (1806-97) presided at this meeting. A life-long farmer, Everett was an early abolitionist and temperance adherent who had served in the Massachusetts state legislature (1833-35). Fitchburg Sentinel, 8 September 1894.} of course, who he believed was a deacon,) but pro-slavery deacons, walking in the footsteps of their leader, (for how could they do otherwise and maintain their office?) on their way to the Sanhedrim,^{4Any of several official Jewish councils in Palestine under Roman rule. Pontius Pilate had Jesus convicted by the Sanhedrin before his crucifixion. Matt. 26:57-68} to the mountain, to discuss some new topic, or gain some new truth; and when passing, spread over this pit his pontifical robe. And the writer would add (by way of interpolation) that the institution was evermore esteemed sacred by virtue of his sacred office, to say nothing of this covering of light over darkness, in our American Aceldema.^{5In Aramaic, Aceldema means “Field of Blood.” The Bible relates that Jewish priests used the money Judas threw in the Temple before hanging himself to buy a potter’s field in Jerusalem as a burial place for foreigners. Matt. 22:7.}