Flashback: Remembering the day Frederick Douglass delivered a speech at the Henry County Courthouse

By DARREL RADFORD Henry County Historian

More than a decade had passed since the end of the Civil War, but on an early fall night of 1876, a packed crowd in the Henry County Courthouse learned the struggle for black people continued. They heard it from one of the most powerful anti-slavery voices of the 19th century – Frederick Douglass.

The former slave who first came to Henry County in 1843 and was given refuge by Greenboro’s Seth Hinshaw was back, this time as a free man.

Douglass Remarks At Courthouse

The New Castle Courier reported the event this way in its Sept. 29, 1876 edition.

“The speech of Fred Douglass at the court house on Tuesday night was an important event in the campaign in Henry County. Although the meeting was little advertised, the court house was densely crowded, and the close attention manifested, showed the respect entertained for the distinguished orator. The audience, too, was different from the audiences found at ordinary political meetings. The old anti-slavery pioneers were out in force to hear the man whose utterances had been so potent in creating an anti-slavery sentiment in the north.

“It was Mr. Douglass’ second appearance at New Castle,” the article continued. “In the summer of 1843 he spoke at the old court house in this place and those who heard the speech remember that he recounted upon that occasion the story of the brutal outrage which was committed upon him at Pendleton a few days before by Democrats of Madison county. The changes which have occurred in the nation since that time seem marvelous. Then slavery existed in one-half of the Union. The Fugitive Slave law was upon the statute books, negroes were forbidden by law to come into the state of Indiana, and John Tyler was in the Presidential chair. When Mr. Douglass traveled through the North, he was subject to outrage and insult, while he would have been remanded to slavery if he had visited the South.

For the second consecutive year, the Henry County Historical Society has featured a daily black history post on its Facebook page during the month of February. If you missed any of them, you can visit our Facebook page and see them all. Here is the most recent post, a flashback of the day Frederick Douglass came to New Castle and spoke to a large crowd at the Henry County Courthouse.

DIFFERENT CIRCUMSTANCES, SIMILAR CHALLENGES

“Upon the occasion of Mr. Douglass’ second appearance at New Castle, he came as an enfranchised citizen, but he is still the earnest advocate of his race, whose wrongs, he believes, are today but little less than in many sections of the South than those endured thirty years ago,” the article continued. “When Mr. Douglass appeared before the large audience, he was greeted with hearty applause. He is now about seventy-five years of age and his abundant hair is nearly white. He is still vigorous and eloquent, but has lost some of the fire of his youth; but when recounting the wrongs inflicted upon his people by the Kuklux and White Leaguers of the South, his old fire seemed to come back.”

While the newspaper article reported there was passion in his voice, pessimism colored his tone and a sense of renewed urgency rose in his words.

“Mr. Douglass regards the future of the country as dark, in the event that the Democratic party obtains control of the government,” the Courier article stated. “He is no alarmist; and spoke of a change of administrations as being desirable in ordinary times, but the utter disregard for law in many of the Southern States, the massacres at Coushatta and Hamburg and the many thousands of murders of negroes by the Democrats of the South filled him with forebodings for the future of his race. The people of the North could scarcely comprehend the atrocity of the Southern Democrats, and it was creditable to their civilization that they could not.”

The Coushatta massacre in 1874, just two years prior to Douglass’ second appearance here, was an attack by members of a white supremacist organization composed of white Southern Democrats, Republican officeholders and freedmen in Coushatta, the parish seat of Red River Parish, Louisiana. They assassinated six white Republicans and five to 20 freedmen who were witnesses.

The Hamburg Massacre (or Red Shirt Massacre or Hamburg riot) was a riot in the town of Hamburg, South Carolina, in July 1876, leading up to the last election season of the Reconstruction Era. It was the first in a series of civil disturbances planned and carried out by white Democrats in the majority-black Republican Edgefield District, with the goal of suppressing black Americans’ civil rights and voting rights.

The Courier article said Douglass used both of these sad events as an example that while the Civil War was

See DOUGLASS, Page 10