An Address To The Citizens Of New York, By Samuel Ennals And Phillip Bell

An Address to the Citizens of New York was published in 1831 and written by Samuel Ennals and Phillip Bell. Samuel Ennals and Phillip Bell are African American abolitionist men who were the chairmen and secretary of the Colored Citizens of New York in the 1830s. The piece was written after a meeting January 25, 1831, in which the Colored Citizens of New York documented what was said at the meeting. The piece was also used to bring to attention gentlemen in another group called the Colonization Society. The document was made to be public and the audience for this piece was abolitionists in the North. Ennals and Bell in their written piece discuss the views of another group called the Colonization Society. The colonization societies believe that

Northern economy mostly relied on the influx of new entrepreneurship opportunities to grow the economy and had massive amounts of factories as well as connections to the railroads to increase the size of money flow. All the while, the South still heavily relied on commercial crop farming, like tobacco and cotton, for economic gains. Because of this, the planter ideal became popular in southern culture. Planters were plantation owners who owned 20 or more slaves and accounted for only 4% of the entire United States population. These plantation owners had almost all the slaves in the South; most slave owners had only one or two slaves that lived with the family. This meant only a handful of people owned a vast majority of so-called human property. The planter ideal became the Southern American dream; the poorer populations saw plantation owners not as lords in a feudal type system and themselves the peasants, but as a social class they could strive to be a part of. This lead to Herrenvolk democracy, a belief that within a master race there is an expectation for democratic parody. While the poorer populations in reality had more in common with slaves, they saw the white plantation owners and a connection with them and did not connect with the African American slavers. These people who believed that they had a

At first glance, you see common comparisons. They were both written by abolitionists, the documents were written in the 1830s, and both were written after public held meetings. Both documents also reference the Declaration of Independence. Looking deep into both documents though, you can see a more striking similarity based on their time period. In the document written by Garrison, he writes “We further believe and affirm that all persons of color who possess the qualifications which are demanded of others, ought to be admitted forth with to the enjoyment of the same privileges and the exercises of the same prerogatives as others” (Garrison 311). Garrison is stating that people of color should be allowed to go forth onto the world and not let their skin color hold them back. Similarly, Ennals and Bell state in their address “We call upon the learned author of the ‘address’ for the indication of distinction between other men. There are different colors among all species of animated creation. A difference of color is not a difference of species” (Ennals and Bell 268). Ennals and Bells are asking what the difference between people of color and Caucasians and explaining in their question that there are no differences between the different skin tones. This means that both of these public pieces of writing similarly convey the want for people of color to not be held