16

644 HISTORICAL ANNOTATION

of sexton, steward, class leader, clerk, and local preacher, as among the happiest
days of my life." James W. Hood, One Hundred Years of the African Methodist
Episcopal Zion Church (New York, 1895), 541-42; Douglass Papers, ser. 2, 2:203;
Blight, Frederick Douglass' Civil War, 6-10; William L. Andrews, "Frederick
Douglass, Preacher," American Literature, 54:592-97 (December 1982).
7.27-28 He became a member...American Anti-Slavery society] Inspired by the
success of the British emancipation movement, a group of sixty-two American abolitionists,
including Quakers, free blacks, New York evangelicals, and New England
radicals such as William Lloyd Garrison, met in Philadelphia in December 1833 and
founded the American Anti-Slavery Society. Garrison drafted most of the society's
original Declaration of Sentiments, which endorsed a blend of immediatist principles
and moral suasion tactics. By the time Douglass became a lecturer for the American
Anti-Slavery Society in the early 1840s, the organization had suffered a serious
schism when many abolitionists had quit in protest at Garrison's stands on women's
rights, religious orthodoxy, and an independent antislavery political party. Merton L.
Dillon, The Abolitionists: The Growth of a Dissenting Minority (DeKalb, Ill., 1974).
52-53, 113-26; James Brewer Stewart, Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and
American Slavery (New York, 1976), 51-52, 92-96.
7.38 England, Ireland, and Scotland] In 1845 Douglass embarked upon
an anti-
slavery tour of the British Isles, landing in Liverpool, England, on 28 August. After
numerous successful speaking engagements, meeting some of the greatest abolitionists
and politicians in Great Britain, and having his freedom purchased by British
acquaintances, Douglass returned to the United States. His ship made landfall on 20
April 1847. Lib., 26 September 1845, 23, 30 April 1847; Alan J. Rice and Martin
Crawford, eds., Liberating Sojourn: Frederick Douglass and Transatlantic Reform
(Athens, Ga., 1999), 1-11.
8.8-9 that colored people...high intellectual position] Nineteenth-century arguments
supporting the intellectual inferiority of blacks proceeded along three interconnected
axes: scientific, aesthetic, and biblical. The ethnological conclusions of Josiah
Clark Nott, George Robert Gliddon, Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz, and Samuel
George Morton collectively formed the doctrines of what came to be known as the
American School of Ethnology. These ethnologists posited a polygenist theory of
racial origin, claiming that each race was a distinct species, based on what they considered
empirical evidence of fixed intellectual inferiority. Morton's measurements of
cranial capacity provided the bulk of this evidence, although Morton himself opposed
slavery and believed that intellectual growth of blacks was impossible because of the
hostile social environment in which they lived rather than because of heredity. Most
ethnological treatises included a chapter on beauty, connecting a racist aesthetic to
both moral and intellectual development. Conversely, white proslavery Christians in
the South argued against polygenesis, classifying blacks as inferior members of the
same species. They claimed that scripture provided a defense of slavery and that the
mission of that institution was to Christianize those of African descent. Some clergymen