Brooklyn, N.Y. 19 Dec[ember] 1856[.]

TO FREDERICK DOUGLASS

MY DEAR SIR,

I thank you, and your daughter¹Rosetta (1839-1906), the first child of Frederick and Anna Douglass, was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, on 24 June 1839. As a child, she wrote and read letters for her mother, whom she assisted with housework and piece work for the shoe factories in Lynn, Massachusetts. At age seven, she was sent to school in Albany, New York, where she lived with Abigail and Lydia Mott. When the Douglass family moved to Rochester, Rosetta began attending the Seward Seminary, where her presence offended the parents of one of the white students and led to her segregation from the other pupils. Her father, in a fury, removed Rosetta from the school and hired a private tutor for her. Rosetta, along with her three brothers, then led other students in the efforts to desegregate Rochester’s public school system. From 1854 to 1855, Rosetta attended Oberlin College preparatory school, which was one of the first institutions of higher education to accept both African Americans and women. She taught in Philadelphia and Salem, New Jersey, until her marriage in 1863 to Nathan Sprague, with whom she had six children. Before her death, she wrote a memoir of her mother, which remains one of the most complete documents of Anna Murray Douglass’s life. Sprague, ; Sterling, , 132-45; Ellen N. Lawson and Marlene Merrill, “The Antebellum ‘Talented Thousandth’: Black College Students at Oberlin before the Civil War,” , 52:145 (Spring 1983); Miriam DeCosta-Willis, “Smoothing the Tucks in Father’s Linen: The Women of Cedar Hill,” , 4:30-33 (Fall 1987); Render, “Afro-American Women,” 307-10.> also, for the copy of your letter to Mrs Sturge.²Probably either Mrs. Hannah Dickinson Sturge (1816-96), second wife of the wealthy Quaker Philanthropist Joseph Sturge (1793-1859), or her sister-in-law Mrs. Lydia Albright Sturge (1807-92), wife of Edmund Sturge (1808-93). Both women, lifelong Quakers, were active in abolitionist circles in Birmingham, England. In addition to being a member of the Birmingham Ladies’ Negro’s Friend Society, Hannah Sturge was involved with the Ladies’ Temperance Movement, the antislavery Free Produce Committee, and the Infirm and Aged Women’s Society. Lydia Sturge, who served as secretary of the Birmingham Ladies’ Negro’s Friend Society for many years, was also involved with the Ladies’ Temperance Movement, the Aborigines Protection Society, and the Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade. Both women hosted Frederick Douglass while he was in England in the 1840s. Lewis Tappan included several members of the Sturge family among his correspondents. (London, 1893), 155-68; , ser. 2, 2:383-84; Bertram Wyatt-Brown, (Baton Rouge, La., 1985), 94-96; Alex Tyrrell, Joseph Sturge and the Moral Radical Party in Early Victorian Britain (London, 1987), 152, 195, 200; Claire Midgley, (1992; New York, 1995), 174, 187-88. It is an ingenious defence, full as much so as was Mr Burlingame’s³Tappan is referring to a duel between Congressmen Preston Smith Brooks, a Democrat of South Carolina, and Anson Burlingame, a Republican of Massachusetts, which reportedly took place in July 1856. Brooks challenged Burlingame to a duel in response to Burlingame’s June speech in the House of Representatives denouncing Brooks’s near-fatal beating of Senator Charles Sumner in May. Choosing rifles, Burlingame accepted the challenge and proposed that the duel take place on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. After initially accepting those terms, Brooks withdrew from the duel, claiming that he feared he would be assassinated if he traveled north to reach the proposed site. Burlingame emerged from the affair with his reputation much enhanced, while Brooks was labeled a coward in Northern newspapers. A native of New Berlin, New York, Anson Burlingame (1820-70) spent his childhood in Ohio and Michigan. In 1846 he graduated from Harvard Law School and went into private practice in Boston. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, Burlingame became active in the antislavery movement and swiftly earned a national reputation for his skills as an orator. After serving in the Massachusetts legislature, he was elected to Congress as a Know-Nothing in 1855. Soon afterward, he helped organize the Republican party in Massachusetts. He lost his bid for a fourth term in Congress in 1860, possibly because he devoted most of his time to campaigning for Abraham Lincoln in the Midwest while neglecting his own campaign back in Massachusetts. Burlingame was rewarded by the Lincoln administration with an appointment as U.S. minister to Austria in March 1861. After the Austrian government objected to his appointment, because of his views on Hungarian independence, Burlingame was appointed minister to China. He filled that post until 1867, when he resigned to accept a commission as China’s first official envoy to the West. As envoy, he was specifically charged with negotiating treaties with foreign powers. In 1868 he negotiated the Burlingame Treaty between the United States and China, which granted reciprocal privileges to both nations. At the time of his death, in 1870, he was negotiating a treaty with Russia. David L. Anderson, “Anson Burlingame: Reformer and Diplomat,”, 25:293-308 (December 1979); , 3:289-90; , 3:965-66. with regard to Mr Brooks.⁴Preston Smith Brooks (1819-57) was born in Edgefield County, South Carolina. A member of one of the most prominent slaveholding families in South Carolina’s Upcountry, Brooks was privately educated. In 1839 he was expelled from the College of South Carolina for unruly behavior and did not receive a degree. After being wounded in a duel with Louis Wigfall in 1840, Brooks was forced to walk with a cane for the rest of his life. In 1844 he was elected to a single term in the South Carolina House of Representatives. He was admitted to the bar in 1846 and went into private practice in Edgefield County until 1853, when he was elected to Congress as a Democrat. While serving his second term in Congress, he assaulted Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner with his cane on the floor of the Senate on 22 May 1856 in response to Sumner’s “The Crime against Kansas” oration, which he had delivered two days earlier. The speech included a personal attack on Brooks’s cousin Senator Andrew P. Butler, who had not been present at the time and was therefore unable to defend himself. Although Sumner barely survived the caning, members of the House of Representatives were unable to muster the two-thirds majority required to expel a sitting member of Congress. Nonetheless, Brooks resigned his seat in July 1856. Viewed as a hero in his home state, he was promptly elected to fill the vacancy created by his own resignation. Brooks remained a member of Congress until his death in January 1857. Donald, , 282-97; David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler, eds., , 5 vols. (Santa Barbara, Calif., 2000), 1:288-89; DAB, 3:88; , 3:625-26. Killing wicked men is merely destroying their visible presence among men. They still live. God has put them in this world & we have no right to send them out of it unbidden of God. I repeat, “Vengeance is mine”.⁵Rom. 12:9. The slaves hear a great deal of what is said & printed at the North. What is the cause of the late insurrection.

Yes, I have read your paper of the 12th very thoroughly & so has my wife.⁶Sarah Jackson Tappan. Your appeal is very able. But I am in doubt. In your speeches & in your paper you advocate the slaughter of slaveholders. I cannot go with you. How then can I take pains to sustain your paper? Say you, Must I cease to be independent? Must I smother my convictions to please my patrons? I answer, By no means. But while you act independently so must I. How can I encourage the wider circulation of a paper, able as it is, deserving in most respects as is the editor, when I believe he is scattering “firebrands, arrows, and death.’’⁷Prov. 26:18. There are so many things in you, my dear friend, that claim my esteem & inspire my confidence that I regret—deeply—that I am unable to go with you in all your sentiments & purposes. I have never been called a coward & I am naturally very sensitive to aggressions; but since I cordially embraced the religion of the Prince of Peace I have believed fully that the belligerent spirit of the world is totally adverse to this princaples. Besides, I think it the most unwise & inexpedient of all conduct. What I should do if attacked or saw a friend attacked I can’t say. Instincts are often stronger than arguments or principles. But it