Frederick Douglass's Plea for Free Speech in Boston, Read Passage by Passage

Imagine a city that prides itself on being the cradle of American liberty, and imagine that same city sending a crowd of well-dressed men to shout down a meeting about liberty. That is not a thought experiment. That is Boston, in December 1860, and the man at the centre of it was Frederick Douglass.

Douglass had escaped slavery, taught himself to read, and become the most formidable orator in the country. When a mob took over an antislavery meeting in the city where the Revolution began, he did not respond with outrage alone. He responded with an argument. It is one of the best arguments for free speech ever written down in English, and it was written by a man who knew exactly what it cost to be denied that freedom.

This post reads that argument closely, in the order he made it. The text is in the public domain and easy to find, so you can check every line against the original. We will cover what happened in the hall, what the speech claims, why the claim was not new even then, and why it is a better answer to today's demands for silence than anything a modern pundit can offer.

Terms and the claim

Before the text, let us define what is being argued. Free speech, in the sense Douglass means, is the right to say what you think, to be heard by anyone willing to listen, and to hold meetings for that purpose, without being silenced by force, whether the force comes from the state or from a crowd the state declines to restrain. It is a moral claim first and a legal claim second. The First Amendment, which forbids Congress from abridging "the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble," is the legal expression of a prior moral conviction.

The claim of the Boston speech can be stated in four sentences.

1. Speech is the right on which every other right depends, because it is the means by which wrongs are exposed and remedied.
2. Tyrants fear it first, which is why they strike it down first.
3. A right to speak is empty if the audience may be driven away or the speaker overawed by a mob.
4. Therefore the person who silences an opponent by force, however righteous he feels, is acting as a tyrant acts, and the cause of the oppressed is the cause of free speech.

That is a point-by-point syllogism, and Douglass would have found it unremarkable. He had been making that case for twenty years.

What happened in the hall

On December 3, 1860, abolitionists gathered at Tremont Temple in Boston for a meeting marking the anniversary of the hanging of John Brown, who had been executed in Virginia on December 2, 1859. Abraham Lincoln had been elected a month earlier. The Southern states were weighing secession, and the mood in the North was nervous. A meeting that proposed to discuss how slavery might be abolished struck a certain class of Boston respectability as reckless, bad for business and bad for the Union.

A crowd arrived to stop it. By the accounts of the time, the disturbers took over the platform, pushed through resolutions over the speakers' protests, and drowned out the speakers. The mayor, though called upon to protect the meeting, ordered it broken up, and the police cleared the hall, so the people ejected were the ones who had called the meeting. Douglass was present at the centre of the disorder, and the meeting was never allowed to finish its business.

Notice the sequence, because it matters for everything that follows. A group of private citizens used noise and numbers to end a lawful meeting. The authorities then resolved the disorder by removing the people who had been disturbed. That is not a government banning speech outright. It is something more familiar and more durable: the heckler's veto, in which the person who objects loudest wins by making the speaker's cost too high. We have a post on that very problem on campuses, in The Heckler's Veto on Campus and What the First Amendment Says About It, and the pattern has not changed in a century and a half. Only the venue has.

Douglass answered on Sunday, December 9, at Boston's Music Hall, with a speech now known as "A Plea for Free Speech in Boston." Here is what he said.

Passage one: speech as the right that guards the others

Douglass opens by setting the stakes high. Free speech, he says, is the "great moral renovator of society and government." Read that phrase slowly. A renovator is not an ornament. It is the mechanism by which a house with a rotten beam gets a new one.

Think of the alternative. If wrongs cannot be named in public, they can only be fixed by the people causing them, who have no reason to. Every reform in American history, from the end of slavery to the end of child labour to the repeal of laws we now regret, began with someone saying aloud what the powerful preferred left unsaid. The mechanism of reform is the mechanism of speech.

This is also the Founders' view. Madison, introducing the amendments in 1789, urged the House to declare expressly "the great rights of mankind," and the freedoms of speech and press were among the rights he proposed to secure. The colonies had already learned this the hard way. Our post on John Peter Zenger and the Jury That Defended American Press Freedom in 1735 tells how a New York printer was jailed in 1734 and acquitted by a jury in 1735 for printing criticism of a royal governor. A free people had decided, a century before Douglass, that the truth about those in power was not a crime.

Passage two: the dread of tyrants

The second claim is the famous one. Douglass says the right of speech is the "dread of tyrants," the right that tyrants strike down first, because they know its power.

This is an observation about behaviour, and it is checkable. Look at what authoritarians do on taking power. They do not begin by abolishing the postal service or taxing bread. They begin with the press, the pulpit and the assembly. They license printers, censor newspapers, ban meetings. The reason is simple. A regime that rests on a lie cannot survive a free conversation.

Slaveholders understood this better than anyone. Douglass says in the same speech that slavery cannot tolerate free speech, and he is not being rhetorical. The system required that a human being in bondage be told he was property, that his children be sold, and that no one in earshot could object. A single honest sentence spoken in the wrong place threatened the arrangement. So the South built a legal and social architecture to prevent that sentence from being uttered, and it extended that architecture north.

The suppression Douglass was answering

That is the history behind the speech, and it explains why Douglass was so exact about the danger. By 1860 the attack on antislavery speech was a generation old.

• The mail campaign of 1835. The American Anti-Slavery Society mailed antislavery tracts to Southern addresses. In July 1835 a crowd in Charleston, South Carolina, broke into the post office and burned the bundles. President Andrew Jackson, in his annual message that year, asked Congress to pass a law forbidding the circulation of such material in the Southern states. Congress did not pass the law, but local postmasters across the South simply refused to deliver the material anyway.
• The gag rule. From 1836, the House of Representatives adopted standing rules that tabled antislavery petitions without reading or debating them. The right "to petition the Government for a redress of grievances" is in the First Amendment, and the House had in effect declared it inoperative on one subject. John Quincy Adams, by then a congressman, fought the rule for years, and the House repealed it in December 1844.
• The mobs. In October 1835 a mob dragged the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison through the streets of Boston with a rope around him. On November 7, 1837, a mob in Alton, Illinois, killed the abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy as he defended his printing press.

Put those three together and you have the whole toolkit: the state suppressing the mail, the legislature suppressing the petition, and the crowd suppressing the speaker. Boston in 1860 was the third tool again, with the police acting as the cleanup crew.

What is remarkable is that Douglass, the victim, takes no joy in the symmetry. He does not argue that antislavery speech deserves protection because it is right. He argues that speech deserves protection because without it no one can find out what is right. That is a more demanding standard and a more durable one.

Passage three: no right to speak where the speaker is overawed

The core of the speech is the third point, and it is the one that speaks most directly to us. A right on paper is not a right in practice if a crowd can take it away at will. Douglass presses the point that the freedom of speech is not honoured by the speaker who is merely permitted to talk to those who already agree. It is honoured when a person can stand up in front of people who despise his views and say them anyway.

Here is the test, and I want you to apply it honestly. Whose speech do you wish to see restrained? Say you can think of someone. Now ask yourself whether the argument you would make for restraining that person is one the Bostonians of 1860 could have made against Douglass. "The topic is inflammatory." "The timing is dangerous." "The audience may be provoked." "The speaker is spreading ideas that harm people." Every one of those arguments was made against the abolitionists, and every one of them was made in good conscience by people who thought they were preserving peace.

That is the trouble with a rule that lets the majority silence what it finds offensive. The majority is the one writing the rule. In 1860 the Boston crowd was the majority. In the Charleston of 1835 it was the majority. And the minority that was silenced was right.

The Supreme Court has since built this insight into doctrine. In Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) the Court held that even advocacy of violence or lawbreaking is protected unless it is directed to inciting imminent lawless action and is likely to produce it. That case, discussed in Brandenburg v. Ohio Protected a Klansman's Speech, and It Protects Yours Too, protected a Klansman. Its logic is Douglass's logic: if the government can pick which hated speakers to punish, it will eventually pick yours.

The best objection, stated fairly

A fair reader will object, and the objection deserves a hearing. It runs like this.

Douglass was defending an oppressed minority against a mob, and the speech is powerful for that reason. But the principle he states is general, and a general principle protects bad people too. The people who speak hatefully, or who spread falsehoods that get others hurt, are not Douglass. Surely a society can decide that some speech is so corrosive that it forfeits protection, and that a decent community does not owe a stage to the worst of it. The Boston mob thought it was defending the Union. Today's critics think they are defending vulnerable people. Why should the first be wrong and the second right?

It is a serious question, and the answer has four parts.

One: the principle is general because the danger is general. The reason the objector gives for restraining the bad speaker, that the speech does harm, is the same reason the mob gave. The objector must explain who decides when speech is harmful, and the honest answer is: whoever holds power. In 1860 that was the Boston respectables. Douglass's insight is that power's judgment on this question has never been trustworthy, because power has a standing interest in finding its critics harmful.

Two: the remedy for bad speech is more speech, and the record shows it works. Douglass did not ask for the mob to be silenced. He asked for the right to answer them. The distinction matters. The law has a narrow, well-drawn set of exceptions for speech that is itself an act, such as true threats, fraud and incitement to imminent violence. Outside those lines, the American tradition says to rebut, not to ban.

Three: the objection assumes the censor will be wiser than the speaker. Look at the people who have been given the power to decide which ideas are too dangerous to hear. The Sedition Act of 1798 jailed critics of John Adams's administration; the story of the congressman who won reelection from his cell is in The Sedition Act of 1798 Jailed a Congressman Who Won Reelection From His Cell. The mail-ban proposals of 1835 targeted antislavery pamphlets. In every case the censor was sure he was protecting the public, and in almost every case history judged the censor.

Four: the objection treats offence as injury. There is a real difference between speech that offends and speech that injures. A speech that shocks you has not touched you. A speech that organises a mob to burn your house is a different thing, and the law has always said so. When the category of injury grows to include discomfort, disagreement and hurt feelings, the right to speak becomes a right to speak only inoffensively, which is no right at all.

Passage four: the speech and the mob's own interest

There is one more move in Douglass's argument that modern readers tend to miss. He tells the Bostonians that they are hurting themselves.

A city that allows its streets to be run by a crowd of the loudest does not enjoy peace. It enjoys a temporary quiet purchased with a permanent liability. Tomorrow's crowd will be different. It will have different targets. And the precedent that a meeting can be broken up by sufficient noise will serve whoever has the most noise on that day.

I find this the most practical point in the speech, and it is one conservatives in particular have reason to remember. For years conservative speakers on college campuses have been shouted down, disinvited and in some cases required to pay for the security that the shouters made necessary. Some of the people applauding then are now discovering that the rule they liked does not stay put. The heckler's veto is a tool, and tools do not care who holds them.

Douglass's version of the warning has a moral edge as well. A person who learns that a crowd may take away another man's voice has learned a lesson about his own. The citizen who cheers the silencing of an opponent is teaching his neighbours how to silence him.

Passage five: the fathers of the government

Douglass also appeals to the founding generation, and here the argument ties to the First Amendment's own history. The speech reminds its audience that no right was held more sacred by the framers than the right of speech. That is a fair reading of the record. The amendment was drafted by men who had lived under licensing laws and seditious libel prosecutions, and who had watched juries refuse to convict printers.

It is worth pausing on a technical point that Douglass's audience would have known. In 1860 the First Amendment bound only the federal government. The Supreme Court had said so in Barron v. Baltimore (1833), and the states were left to their own constitutions. That is why a Massachusetts mob could break up a meeting without any federal question arising. The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, would change that, and the courts would eventually hold that its guarantee of liberty carries the freedom of speech against the states. The men who wrote the Fourteenth Amendment had in mind the exact abuses Douglass described. The speech, in a real sense, is part of the legislative history of that amendment.

If you want a measure of how seriously the Founders took the principle, read what the Constitution protects: not speech that pleases, but speech. The text makes no exception for the unpopular. Our post on Freedom of the Press Meant No Prior Restraint, and Then It Meant More traces how the courts gradually filled in what the clause means, and it is a useful companion to this reading.

What the speech answers today

Here is where the Boston speech earns its place on a conservative site. Everyone now claims to defend free speech, and almost everyone defends it for their own side. Douglass's speech is the corrective, because it gives the test that distinguishes principle from convenience: would you defend the right of your opponent to say it?

Apply it to three modern habits.

• Disinvitation. When a university withdraws an invitation because a crowd threatens to disrupt the talk, it ratifies the Boston method. The crowd has voted with its volume.
• Deplatforming by pressure. When a campaign persuades a company to drop a speaker, the law is not involved, and a private business may choose its associations. But the culture that celebrates the pressure has abandoned Douglass's premise, which is that the remedy for bad speech is a better answer. We take up the cultural side in Cancel Culture Has No Judge, No Jury and No Statute of Limitations.
• Governments leaning on speech. When officials pressure private intermediaries to suppress what they dislike, the state is doing at a distance what the Charleston postmaster did in person.

Notice that the second habit is a different thing from the first and third in law, and I would not pretend otherwise. A private organisation declining to host a speaker has not violated the First Amendment. But a free society needs more than a legal rule. It needs a habit. Douglass was asking Boston for the habit of listening, and the habit is what is in short supply.

One more comparison, since I promised some humour. The Boston mob of 1860 at least had the courage of its convictions: it showed up in person, in the same room, and made noise in public. The modern version has been improved by technology, and can silence a stranger from a phone at midnight, without leaving the sofa. That is not progress. That is the same impulse with a better supply chain.

A note on tone

It is worth observing how Douglass speaks. He is not polite about the mob. He is direct, sometimes scornful, and plainly angry. But he does not ask for the mob's silencing. He asks for the room back. A man who has been beaten, sold, and denied his own education stands in a Boston hall and says that even those who disrupted him have a right to speak, because without that right no one will be able to tell them they are wrong.

That is the standard. It is not a comfortable one. It requires you to defend the person you would most like to see quiet, and to do it because you believe the argument will win. Douglass believed the argument would win. He was right: the cause he defended ended slavery in five years.

The case in brief

1. A mob broke up an antislavery meeting at Tremont Temple on December 3, 1860, and Douglass answered at Music Hall on December 9 with a defence of free speech as the right that guards every other right.
2. Tyrants strike speech first, and the record from the 1835 mail burnings to the House gag rule to the death of Elijah Lovejoy shows that slavery in particular could not survive an open conversation.
3. A right to speak is empty if a crowd can overawe the speaker, and the argument for silencing a hated speaker is the same argument the Boston mob used against Douglass.
4. The remedy for bad speech is more speech and a narrow set of exceptions, such as incitement to imminent violence and true threats, not a power to ban what offends.
5. The test of a free-speech principle is whether you would defend the right of your opponent, and Douglass met it when it cost him the most.

What you can do: read the First Amendment's forty-five words and the full text of Douglass's 1860 speech, then, the next time a speaker you dislike is invited to your campus or town, write to the host in defence of letting the speech go ahead.