A Philosophical Pike
An essay for the Weekly Anglo-African
~ This entry is part of my project of identifying, compiling, and editing the complete written and spoken works of James McCune Smith (1813-1865) in association with Northumbria University and funded by the British Academy. ~
Title: A Philosophical Pike
Date: ca. 13-17 March 1860
Source: The Weekly Anglo-African, 17 March 1860, p. 2 (in Internet Archive)
Text:
A PHILOSOPHICAL PIKE.[1]
The doctrine of progressive development―that is, the development in the lower, resulting in a higher species of organized being―has received a new impulse of late from the remarkable book of “Darwin on Species.”[2] Additional impulse, also, in the same direction, has accrued from the recent exhibition of a “Talking Fish,” (now, alas! deceased)[3] and a “philosophising Pike,”[4] (now, thanks be to gracious, alive and kicking.)
A morning print, which some years ago laid the literary world under deep obligation by publishing the remarkable essay of “Richelieu on Sausages,”[5] is the fortunate medium of communication between the same world and the philosophical Pike.[6] Moreover, the city of Washington, in which the first essay was written, is also the ever-memorable locality in which―Pike floundered.[7] No wonder that it rained on Washington’s Birthday―no wonder the Seventh Regiment was left squashing in the mud[8]―Washington was occupied by a nobler presence than Washington or the doughty Seventh. It contained Pike, and not only Pike, but Pike in labor with his philosophical speculations,[9] speculations which required water and mud―and the hour suited itself to the―Pike. And now, let us hear these views which constitute not perhaps a “higher law,”[10] but certainly higher Pikery (Hiera Picra)[11] than has yet fallen in our way. There is the force and strength of a strong young whale in the exordium.[12] Pike dixit.[13]
“The negro question developes all sorts of ideas, from the ‘irrepressible conflict’ doctrine to that which esteems human slavery to be the fruit of a divine beneficence. Ingenuity is taxed on the one side and the other of the case, until all its relations and associations have become wearisome. It is not too much to say that every measure in Congress turns upon it. Every personal outrage here (of course the outrage on the Seventh Regiment included) grows out of it. All political movements find their source in it. All social arrangements are shaped by it. The loves and the hates, the partizanships, the prejudices, the association and communion of all men and women of the federal capital, are colored, guided, and for the most part created by the negro question.”
This is a strong, clear statement of a truth remarkable in itself, and encouraging to the eye of faith and reason, for it shows, under an apparently contradictory aspect, that there is after all a national conscience, visibly stirred by our great national sin. And Reason and Christianity would add, let the negro be the source of all ideas and all action in and out of the American Congress and nation, until by the exercise towards him of mercy and justice and giving him full affranchisement, he shall cease to become the cause of all such commotion. But what does Pike say? Hear him: “in view of this palpable fact, what question so natural as, ‘Where is this all to end!’ It seems to me there can be but one answer. This is the elimination of the negro from our controversy. But how is he to be got out? Only in one way, by dismissing him from among us.” Further on, he explains thus: “We say the Free States should say, confine the negro to the smallest possible area. Hem him in. Coop him up. SLOUGH HIM OFF.”
To those not familiar with surgery, it is well to explain, that to slough a part off, is to procure the death of the part by the process of mortification.[14] And this is the process by which the philosophical Pike proposes to get rid of the negro question―KILLING OFF THE NEGROES. Charles O’Conor hinted at this process, at the Academy of Music,[15] hinted at the “extermination of the negroes as a means of getting rid of the question,” but considered it too inhuman. He preferred, “if gentlemen pleased, perpetual slavery.” But here is a Pike, with less heart than even Charles O’Conor, who does not hesitate at herding together and putting to death four millions of human beings, whose right to life is at least four million times as great as any plea he can offer for his own pitiful, miserable existence. Charlemagne, teased and pestered beyond endurance by the thieving piratical Saxons, invaded their land, assembled the whole nation, planted his sword Joyeuse in the middle of a field, and cut off every head[16] which reached higher than its hilt, in order, as the liturgy says, to “grant peace in our time, O Lord.”[17] But here comes, in our greater day, the great Pike, Pike le magne,[18] penny-a-liner to the New York “Tribune,” co-negro hater of the distinguished Mr. Horace Greeley[19]―and proposes to “coop in” and “slough off” four millions of black people. To be sure, Pike afterwards says “that the African and Caucasian in this part of the continent must first separate, in order to establish the conditions under which a future union or fusion of (these) races is possible.” But here Pike is decidedly muddy. There is no such thing as uniting the dead with the living, the part which has been sloughed off with the part from which it has been thus separated. What a worse than vampire he must be to propose to unite dead negroes with living white men and women?
We hinted, last week, with deep solicitude, at the possible dementia of the editor-in-chief of the New York “Tribune.”[20] It is but charity to hope that Pike is absolutely crazy, a proper inmate for the madhouse; the only wonder is that a statement so foolishly horrible should have been permitted admission even in the columns of that newspaper. There is just one point, however, on which we coincide with Pike. There will be some sloughing done in the progress of the negro question. The men who, with all the light of the nineteenth century blazing upon them, with the national conscience groaning beneath them, and seeking light and guidance in the path of freedom and justice―we say that the men so enlightened, and so looked up to, who shall yet suffer petty personal aversions, or dim hopes of party triumph, to cause them to utter such dark counsels as those of Pike, and Greeley, and Blair,[21] and Doolittle,[22] these men will be sloughed off from all that is good and true in the land, and will lie blasted beneath the bright and shimmery light of a truth which they will not comprehend, and a justice to the negro which they are too feeble kneed to stand up before.
Why, the Legislature of Maryland, in refusing to pass the free negro bill,[23] stands beyond these men as day does to night. Judge Catron, of the Supreme Court, in his appeal against the Tennessee free negro bill,[24] is a saint of light as compared with these creatures of darkness. And we here warn the Republican party that there is one in this land against which neither they nor the gates of hell can prevail―and that is, the negro. God has placed him here, and will keep him here. Clay[25] and Calhoun,[26] McDuffy[27] and Greeley, yea, the immortal Pike, are but individuals, whose oppressions are limited by years three score and ten―but the negro is a race, strong, multiplying and enduring, whose triumph will come when these haters have sloughed off and “forgotten lie.”[28]
One word more. Our brethren of the Garrisonian faith, have plead as seldom men have plead before, in behalf of the doctrine of come-outer-ism, in Church and State.[29] They have hurled their intensest Thunder upon the false-hearted and unprincipled abolitionists who remain in ecclesiastical or political connexion with those who uphold slavery anywhere. With what consistency can the secretary of that society continue to be an employee in the office of the New York “Tribune,” which is pledged to uphold slavery in the slave States as long as those States will have slavery exist―and with what consistency can the most brilliant writer of the Garrisonian party continue to receive his thirty pieces of silver,[30] yoked to one who, like the great Pike, proposes to slough off four millions of human beings?
[1] James McCune Smith wrote this editorial in response to James Shepherd Pike’s most recent piece in the New-York Tribune. Pike, the Tribune’s popular Washington correspondent, was a former Whig and Free-Soiler who aligned himself with the most ardent anti-slavery wing of the Republican Party, along with William H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase, and William P. Fessenden. Over time, however, it became evident that Pike’s hatred of slavery and slaveholders was motivated in large part by his hatred of black people’s presence and influence in the United States. See James Shepherd Pike, ‘What We Shall Do With the Negro’, New-York Tribune (New York), 13 March 1860; Robert Franklin Durden, James Shepherd Pike: Republicanism and the American Negro, 1850-1882 (Duke University Press, 1957), iii–iv, 14–16, 29–35.
[2] As another of McCune Smith’s 1860 essays reveals, he read Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species not long after it was first published in London in late November 1859. See ‘A Word for the “Smith Family”’, The Anglo-African Magazine, March 1860, 79–83 (In Internet Archive). For Origin’s early publication history, see Adrian J. Desmond and James Moore, Darwin (Michael Joseph, 1991), 474–78, 492. McCune Smith may have picked up an early edition of what was still a rather obscure scientific work at Baillière’s bookstore and publisher, where he regularly consulted and/or purchased scientific and medical publications. See ‘From Our New York Correspondent [1, 8, and 9 December 1854]’, Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 15 December 1854; ‘Heads of the Colored People - No. X: The Schoolmaster (Continued)’, Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 17 November 1854; ‘From Our New York Correspondent [27 September 1856]’, Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 3 October 1856. McCune Smith found Darwin’s account of ‘progressive development’ – i.e., evolution – to be a beautiful as well as an eloquent and unifying theory about change in living organisms over time within a divinely created, ordered world: ‘The grand result of these labors is the announcement of the Catholic idea, that the Creator, instead of putting on apron and rolling up sleeves in the laboratory of nature, and manufacturing each separate genus and each separate species by a separate and peculiar manipulation, and then setting them down in pairs, …the Creator simply set in motion the earliest form of organism (a crystallization of quartz, e. g.) and out of this, favored by concurrently favoring circumstances, grew a higher and a higher organism…Mr. Darwin shows very clearly that mankind are not only of one origin, but that origin—common to all—passes through all the inferior gradations of animals (apes included*), plants and crystals.’ See ‘Word’ 79-80 (In Internet Archive).
[3] A ‘Talking Fish’ – or rather, a trained seal whose vocalizations included some which sounded like ‘mamma’ and ‘papa’ to some observers – was exhibited in the British Isles until its death in early January 1860. See ‘The Talking Fish’, Brooklyn Evening Star, 14 July 1859; ‘Death of the “Talking Fish”’, Brooklyn Eagle, 18 January 1860.
[4] ‘Philosophising’ alludes to Pike’s many allusions to philosophers in ‘What Shall We Do.’ In one passage, Pike observed that ‘Our statesmen, philosophers, and philanthropists, have long perplexed themselves over’ problems resulting from the ‘anomaly of negro Slavery’ in ‘a great democratic republic’ mostly representing ‘the dominant and intelligent race.’ In another set of passages, Pike wrote that the ‘grim slaveholding philosopher, if such here be… fears nothing but the blind forces of the enslaved mass, or the great storms of political action, breaking from prescribed boundaries.’ Further on, Pike wrote: ‘We are aware that the idea of non-amalgamating races is repudiated by philosophers and the higher grade of historians,’ but dismissed their repudiation on the grounds that the vast timeframes they concerned themselves with were mostly irrelevant when it came solving to the practical political and social problems of the present time (‘We deal with comparatively near events’), though Pike allowed that the ‘union or fusion of races is possible’ in the distant future. Pike argued that, in the meantime, ‘the separation of the White and Black races… is all important as a means of promoting the national harmony and progress’ of the United States for the long term. See Pike, ‘What We Shall Do,’ NYTr, 13 Mar 1860.
[5] McCune Smith is likely referring here to William Erigena Robinson’s correspondent’s letter to the New-York Daily Tribune of 27 March 1846; Robinson served as an assistant editor and Washington correspondent of the Tribune under the name ‘Richelieu.’ In that letter, Robinson wrote of being kicked out of the reporter’s gallery of the US House of Representatives only to be seated in the more comfortable ladies’ gallery above instead, at the invitation of female supporters of the Tribune. A ‘Loco-Foco looking individual’ took his lunch of bread and sausages to the ladies’ gallery and started eating it there, only to be strongly rebuked for this uncouth behavior. Robinson appears to have intended this sausage anecdote as a metaphor for the general ‘impudence and vulgarity’ of the Loco Focos (the popular term for a pro-working-class, anti-Tammany-Hall, Andrew Jackson-supporting faction of the Democratic party.) See ‘Richelieu’, ‘From Washington’, New-York Daily Tribune, 27 March 1846; ‘Robinson, William Erigena’, Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, accessed 16 December 2025, https://bioguide.congress.gov/search/bio/R000355.
[6] Pike had taken over as the Tribune’s Washington correspondent starting in April 1850. See Durden, James Shepherd Pike, 13.
[7] McCune Smith is likely referring here to Pike’s increasing tendency to include negative characterizations of black people in his letters as Washington correspondent since at least the early 1850’s, even as he continued to fiercely attack slavery and the ‘slavocracy.’ See Durden, James Shepherd Pike, 31.
[8] As the Herald reported, the New York’s Seventh Regiment was present at the inauguration of the new equestrian statue in the nation’s capital on George Washington’s birthday. However, due to the heavy rain and a planning oversight, the marching regiment ended up stopped on a part of the road ‘where the mud was six inches deep.’ See ‘Washington’s Birthday’, The New York Herald, 23 February 1860.
[9] Pike’s ‘philosophical speculations’ in his letter for the Tribune, including on the separation of white and black Americans and on amalgamation, were mocked in another biting satire of ‘What Shall We Do’ in another Anglo-African publication. William J. Wilson, another regular contributor to the Anglo-African Magazine and editor of the Weekly Anglo-African newspaper, wrote ‘What Shall We Do with the White People?’ for the Magazine’s February issue. Among other things, Wilson suggested that it would be best for white Americans to self-deport for causing so much trouble, since it would be too inhumane and impractical to forcefully remove them all from the country. Yet, Wilson mused, it was possible that white Americans would amalgamate with black Americans (the ‘milder and more genial race’) to the point that the former would ‘lose their own peculiar and objectionable characteristics.’ See William J. Wilson, ‘What Shall We Do with the White People?’, The Anglo-African Magazine, February 1860 (In Internet Archive). (Note that the February issue of the Magazine wasn’t published until May, at least two months after Pike’s letter was published in the Tribune; see ‘The Anglo-African Magazine, for February’, The Weekly Anglo-African, 26 May 1860 (In Internet Archive).
[10] McCune Smith is likely alluding here to the “higher law” that prominent lawyer, ardent unionist, and Tammany Hall Democratic advocate and politician Charles O’Conor claimed made slavery a natural, divinely-ordered institution; see below for McCune Smith’s direct allusion to O’Conor in this editorial. McCune Smith had offered a series of remarks and resolutions at an indignation meeting of black Americans held on 19 January 1860 against Charles O’Conor’s anti-black, pro-slavery speech at a huge political rally held at New York City’s Academy of Music a month earlier. See ‘Colored Folks’ Indignation Meeting: Mass Meeting of Young Colored Men - Charles O’Conor Denounced’, The New York Herald, 20 January 1860.
[11] ‘Hiera picra’ (‘holy bitter’) – a pharmaceutical preparation with ancient origins typically made of aloe, canella, and other ingredients, including spices. Another term for this preparation was ‘bitter aloes,’ a term McCune Smith used in another editorial a few months later. See ‘Frederick Douglass at Home’, The Weekly Anglo-African, 16 June 1860; Charles J. S. Thompson, The Mystery and Art of the Apothecary (John Lane, 1929), 35–42.
[12] Latin for ‘beginning.’ See Robert Ainsworth, Ainsworth’s Latin Dictionary: Reprinted from the Folio Edition of 1752 (Joseph Ogle Robinson, 1830), 128 (In Internet Archive).
[13] Latin for ‘Pike said.’ See Ainsworth’s Latin Dictionary, 303.
[14] A surgical manual of this period likewise describes this process as ‘the loss of the vital functions of a part, or the destruction of its organic texture, either in consequence of the action of some direct cause, as heat, cold, &c, or from the application of such means as produce immediate disorganization of the tissues, or from the effects of indirect causes… The dead portion resulting from a circumscribed gangrene [or ‘superficial tissues’] is usually spoken of as a “slough,” whilst the process which creates it is designated as “sloughing.”’ See Henry H. Smith, A Treatise on the Practice of Surgery (J. B. Lippincott and Co., 1856), 135–36.
[15] The selections in quotes which follow aren’t direct quotes from O’Conor’s speech, but rather McCune Smith’s summaries of what he believed O’Conor had ‘hinted’ at and of what he actually argued in his speech at the Academy of Music. O’Conor argued that ‘negroes’ were natural inferiors of ‘the white man’ and that dominion of the latter over the former was necessary in the South to make black people industrious and to prevent them from being a danger to white people. See ‘Immense Conservative Demonstration at the Academy of Music: Speech of Charles O’Conor’, The New York Herald, 20 December 1859.
[16] This appears to be based on a hagiographical and often fanciful account of Charlemagne’s life by a man known only as the Monk of St. Gall. According to a 1907 translation, ‘Charles [Charlemagne] was detained for a little at Aix by the arrival of many visitors and the hostility of the unconquered Saxons and the robbery and piracy of the Northmen and Moors… the barbarous nations of the north attacked Noricum and eastern Frankland and ravaged a great part of it. When he heard of this he humiliated them in his own person; and he gave orders that all the boys and children of the invaders should be “measured with the sword”; and if anyone exceeded that measurement he should be shortened by a head.” See Einhard and Monk of St. Gall, Early Lives of Charlemagne, ed. A. J. Grant (Chatto and Windus, 1907), 130–31. (I’ve been unable to locate a version, translation, or re-telling of this account that McCune Smith would most likely have read.) A history of France published in New York City the year McCune Smith wrote this editorial characterizes the event rather differently: after Charlemagne’s army under other generals invaded Saxony and suffered a ‘severe defeat,’ Charlemagne ‘hastened to the rescue.’ Leading Saxon that Charlemagne rounded up by force and persuasion blamed the revolt on one of their other leaders and offered to pledge fealty and be baptized, but ‘the angry King of the Franks had been too often deceived by their hypocrisy (which he should have remembered he himself had encouraged) to receive their protests and expostulations. All that were convicted of having taken arms in the late campaign, to the number of four thousand five hundred men, were decapitated on the spot. A bloody and repulsive revenge, which stained forever the fame of this otherwise noble chieftain!’ See Parke Godwin, The History of France, Vol. 1 (Ancient Gaul) (Harper & Brothers, 1860), 430–31.
[17] See the formulation ‘Give peace in our time, O Lord’ in the classic Anglican liturgy; e.g., William Hopkins, ed., The Liturgy of the Church of England (A. Millar, 1763), [17] (In Internet Archive) or ‘Grant us thy Peace in our Time’ in A Manual of Prayers and Other Christian Devotions (Thomas Meighan, 1728), 46 (In Internet Archive).
[18] Likely ‘Pike the eater’ (French), and likely in reference to McCune Smith’s comparison of Pike to a vampire below.
[19] Pike became Washington correspondent to the Tribune at the invitation of its founder and editor Horace Greeley. See Durden, James Shepherd Pike, 13. McCune Smith frequently accused Greeley of ‘negro hate’, especially in his negative portrayals of African Americans and support for colonization. See, for example, ‘African Colonisation - The Other Side, No. II’, The National Anti-Slavery Standard, 11 September 1851; ‘Letter from Communipaw [4 February 1852]’, Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 12 February 1852; ‘Horoscope [16/23 February 1856]’, Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 7 March 1856; ‘Mr. Horace Greeley’s Dislikes’, The Weekly Anglo-African, 10 March 1860. Here, McCune Smith portrays Greeley and Pike as likeminded opponents of slavery – not out of concern for justice or humanity, but out of thoroughgoing racial bigotry towards black people.
[20] In his editorial for the previous issue of the Weekly Anglo-African, McCune Smith wrote: ‘To put Horace Greeley’s dislikes down in cool, plain English, he dislikes the negro so thoroughly that he would [rather] unhinge all the progress and all the history, including himself, of the last century and a half, “than had the negro been brought to America.” Had this thought come from a wretched and jaded misanthrope, not burdened with any but moping and sallow melancholy, it would hardly excite remark; but when it comes from one in the full exercise of powerful, vigorous, and active intellect, it falls with a sudden, strange jar on the ear, which awakens intense solitude for the sanity of the author.’ See McCune Smith, ‘Mr. Horace Greeley’s Dislikes,’ WAA, 10 Mar 1860.
[21] McCune Smith had written an editorial opposing the Missourian Republican politician and former congressman Francis Preston Blair’s lecture in Boston promoting colonization (after abolishing slavery) from the year before. See James McCune Smith, ‘F.P. Blair’s Lecture in Boston’, Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 11 February 1859. (McCune Smith was serving as pro tem editor of Douglass’ Paper at the time.) McCune Smith also critically alluded to Blair in other articles; see ‘We Publish in Another Column...’, The National Reformer 1, no. 4 (1838): 59; ‘A Statistical View of the Colored Population of the United States - From 1790 to 1850. Continued [Part 3]’, The Anglo-African Magazine, April 1859; ‘Massachusetts’, The Anglo-African, 12 December 1863.
[22] On 9 February 1859, in a debate over a congressional bill for annexing Cuba, Senator James R. Doolittle of Wisconsin introduced a substitution proposal that the United States appropriate fifty million dollars for purchasing territory in the Yucatan or Central or South America for colonizing free African Americans there. In a lengthy speech defending his proposal on 11 February, Doolittle argued that ‘You must make an outlet for these people [black Americans], or you must be Africanized in those states where they are increasing in such a ratio, compared with the increase of the whites.’ See ‘Important from Washington’, New York Daily Herald (New York, New York), 10 February 1859; The Acquisition of Cuba - Colonization of Central America. Speech of Hon. J. R. Doolittle, of Wisconsin. Delivered at the United States Senate, February 11, 1859 (Buell & Blanchard, Printers, 1859), 6 (In Internet Archive). McCune Smith also critically cited Doolittle and his colonizationist views on earlier occasions. See McCune Smith, ‘Statistical View (Part 3),’ AAM, Apr 1859, 97(in Hathi Trust) and ‘On the Fourteenth Query,’ AAM, Aug 1859, 238 (in Hathi Trust).
[23] The ‘free negro bill,’ which sought to sharply restrict the rights and population of free black people in Maryland – by, among other things, prohibiting manumission, fining free black people for entering the state, and forcing unemployed free black people into apprenticeships or selling them into slavery – was pushed by pro-slavery members of the state legislature despite widespread popular opposition to its most oppressive measures. It was amended and voted on many times between its introduction in January and the time McCune Smith wrote this editorial. Ultimately, it was put to a referendum in the autumn of 1860 and was resoundingly defeated by poplar vote. See ‘The Bill Introduced in the House of Delegates...’, The Daily Exchange, 7 March 1860; James M. Wright, The Free Negro in Maryland, 1634-1860 (Columbia University, 1921), 315–16.
[24] US Supreme Court Justice John Catron, a Unionist supporter of James Buchanan, had voted with the majority in the Dred Scott case. Nevertheless, he publicly and vehemently opposed the ‘free negro bill’ of Tennessee. As the Baltimore Sun reported, Catron wrote a ‘strong and manly appeal… elicited by a recent attempt in Tennessee to pass laws of a character, still more objectionable and severe, than those now before the Legislature of Maryland, and has been extensively circulated.’ In it, Catron explained: ‘My objection to the bill is, that it proposed to commit an outrage, to perpetuate an oppression and cruelty. …This depressed and helpless portion of our population is designed to be driven out, or to be enslaved for life, and their property forfeited… The mothers are to be sold, or driven away from their children.’ Catron insisted that this ‘free negro bill’ was not popular, regardless of its promoters’ claims, and its morally abhorrent and wantonly cruel measures would discredit Tennessee and make enemies of the Northern states. See ‘The Free Colored People of Maryland’, The Sun, 8 February 1860; Burnett Anderson, ‘John Catron, 1837-1865’, in The Supreme Court Justices: Illustrated Biographies, 1789-1993, ed. Clare Cushman (Congressional Quarterly, 1993), 129–30.
[25] McCune Smith had long criticized the politician and statesman Henry Clay for his commitment to compromising with slave states; see ‘Henry Clay’s Speech’, The Colored American, 16 February 1839; ‘The Liberty Party - No. IV (From the Northern Star and Clarksonian)’, National Anti-Slavery Standard, 14 November 1844; ‘Messrs. Editors [18 December 1851]’, Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 25 December 1851.
[26] McCune Smith had long criticized and would continue to criticize politician and Secretary of State John C. Calhoun for his vehement support of slavery and for knowingly and dishonestly using errors in the 1840 census to support his case. See, for example, ‘War! War!!’, The Colored American, 9 March 1839; ‘Hon. John C. Calhoun and the Free Colored People,’ New-York Tribune, 8 May 1844; ‘Address to the People of the State of New York’, New York Herald, 29 January 1852; ‘A Curious Inquiry’, The Anglo-African, 20 February 1864.
[27] In November 1835, Governor George McDuffie of South Carolina delivered a long message to the state legislature in which he made a John C. Calhoun-style defence of slavery not only as a necessary institution, but a divinely-ordained one that was beneficial to the enslaved and enslaver alike. See George McDuffie, ‘Governor’s Message’, The Charleston Mercury, 27 November 1835. The Glasgow Emancipation Society discussed selections of McDuffie’s message at gatherings it hosted in mid-July 1836; see George Thompson et al., Discussion on American Slavery, between George Thompson, Esq. [and] Rev. Robert J. Breckinridge, 2nd edn (George Gallie, 1836), 135–36. (McCune Smith almost certainly wasn’t there, however, because he was still probably on his Paris/London trip with his visiting mentor Peter Williams, Jr. See ‘Peter Williams, Jr to John Frederick Schroeder, 30 July 1836’, n.d., Page images courtesy of Randy F. Weinstein, W.E.B. Du Bois Center-Great Barrington: Museum of Civil Rights Pioneers; Philip A. Bell, ‘Death of Dr. Jas. McCune Smith’, The Elevator, 22 December 1865. Bell appears to have mixed up the year McCune Smith was in Europe in company with Williams.)
[28] From lines in a traditional hymn adapted from Ecclesiastes 9:4-6, 10: ‘The living know that they must die; / But all the dead forgotten lie; / Their mem’ry and their sense is gone, / Alike unknowing and unknown.’ See A Selection of Hymns, For the Use of Social Religious Meetings, and for Private Devotions (Erastus Worthington, 1828), 171.
[29] Abolitionists who adhered to the views of William Lloyd Garrision, who advocated disunion (free states severing their union with slave states) and cutting all ties, personally and institutionally, with churches and denominations that supported or even tolerated slavery. See David W. Blight, ‘William Lloyd Garrison at Two Hundred: His Radicalism and His Legacy for Our Time’, in William Lloyd Garrison at Two Hundred: History, Legacy, and Memory, ed. James Brewer Stewart, The David Brion Davis Series (Yale University Press, 2008), 6–7.
[30] Refers to the betrayal of Jesus Christ by his disciple Judas for the payment of thirty pieces of silver. See Matthew 26:15-16 in The Holy Bible, Containing the Old and New Testaments [King James Version] (William W. Woodward, 1813), 728.