reaching his door, my ear was saluted by the eloquent music of a band, who had met at that late (early) hour to give Mr. Garrison and myself a musical welcome to Pittsburgh. On reaching the house of Mr. Vashon, I was surrounded by a large company of gentlemen constituting a committee of reception. These all seemed warm and fully alive to our common cause.

This gratifying reception was more than compensation for the dastardly insults to which I was subjected during my rough journey to that place. To make up for the starving to which I had been subjected, friend Vashon soon introduced me to his table ladened with the good things of this life.⁷A reference to Gen. 45:23.

On Wednesday afternoon I spoke to a large audience in the Temperance Hall,⁸Douglass spoke at Pittsburgh’s Temperance Hall twice on 11 August 1847, once on his own, and later sharing the platform with Garrison, who arrived in Pittsburgh late as a result of confusions over tickets in Harrisburg. Merrill and Ruchames, Garrison Letters, 3:508–09. and I trust a good impression was made in behalf of our righteous cause. The press of Pittsburgh has treated us with great respect, and while it does not agree with us, it has indulged in none of the low, mean, and filthy slang, so common on the part of a portion of the press in your city respecting such meetings.⁹The National Anti-Slavery Standard reprinted two articles from the Pittsburgh Gazette concerning Douglass’s visit to western Pennsylvania. The first account noted that “Mr. Douglass spoke eloquently,” and offered a summary of his afternoon remarks arguing that the actions of northerners helped to support slavery. The newspaper gave similar attention to Garrison’s account of the history of antislavery activity in the North. The second article was less charitable to the abolitionists. Reprinted in the “proslavery” column of the National Anti-Slavery Standard, the remarks of Erastus Brooks explained the treatment of Douglass and Garrison in the previous article as journalism that would “enable the public to judge of the men by the creeds they publish.” Brooks’s editorial then moved to condemn Douglass and Garrison as extremists, “equally dangerous men” as compared to the “ultra school of pro-slavery men.” NASS, 26 August 1847.

The enclosed, though a very imperfect report of our meetings, may be inserted as showing the character of our meetings and the spirit of the press in that city. If it does not agree with us, it does not caricature us, and as Daniel Webster¹⁰Daniel Webster (1782–1852) was a lawyer and statesman known for his stirring oratory. As a lawyer, he successfully argued many cases before the Supreme Court, such as the 1816 Dartmouth College case and the 1819 McCulloch v. Maryland case, earning a reputation as a strong nationalist. During the War of 1812 Webster represented New Hampshire in Congress (1812–46). Then, in 1827, he was elected to the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts, where he remained in service through most of his life. He continued to take strong nationalist positions in political debates, attacking Andrew Jackson’s 1832 veto of the Second Bank of the United States and opposing Nullification in 1832–33. Webster accepted appointment as secretary of state under William Henry Harrison and was the sole cabinet member from Harrison’s presidency to retain his office during John Tyler’s administration. In 1842 he negotiated the Webster-Ashburton Treaty with Great Britain, establishing the modern boundary between the United States and Canada, but resigned his post a year later and returned to the Senate in 1845. In 1848 Webster made an unsuccessful bid for the Whig presidential nomination, losing to war hero Zachary Taylor. In 1850 Webster once again left the Senate to act as secretary of state under Millard Fillmore, a move that placed him in a good position to bid for the presidency; but he lost the 1852 Whig nomination to Winfield Scott. Though not an abolitionist, he opposed the extension of slavery in the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the Mexican-American War, and the enforcement of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. Robert V. Remini, Daniel Webster: The Man and His Time (New York, 1997), 15–21; ANB, 22:865–68; DAB, 11:585–92. said of General Harrison,¹¹William Henry Harrison (1773–1841), the son of a Virginia planter, gained national prominence as a military leader in the Northwest Territory in the decades after the American Revolution. After resigning his commission in 1798, Harrison embarked upon a successful political career in the Old Northwest, first as secretary of the Northwest Territory, then as the territory’s representative to Congress, and finally as governor of Indiana and superintendent of Indian affairs. Harrison favored the introduction of slavery into Indiana and even called a special convention there to consider the possibility in 1802. Territorial disputes with Native Americans drew Harrison back into the military, and he attracted national attention after his defeat of the western confederacy led by Tecumseh at the Battle of Tippecanoe Creek in 1811. During the War of 1812, as brigadier general in charge of the Indiana and Illinois frontier, Harrison won a decisive victory against the British and their Native American allies, for which he was awarded a congressional gold medal. Between 1816 and 1828 Harrison served in Congress and the Ohio state senate. Following a failed bid to become John Quincy Adams’s vice presidential running mate in 1828, Harrison accepted appointment as ambassador to Colombia, a post that he held until 1830. In 1840 Harrison ran for president as a Whig, with John Tyler as his running mate, spawning the slogan “Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too.” His status as war hero and Indian fighter fueled his “Log Cabin and Hard Cider” campaign, in which Harrison was portrayed as a hero of the common man. Harrison, however, died of pneumonia on 4 April 1841, after serving only one month as president. Norma Lois Peterson, The Presidencies of William Henry Harrison and John Tyler (Lawrence, Kans., 1989), 17–43; DAB, 8:348–51; ANB, 10:223–26. “he is an honest man, and that is something,” so I say of the papers of Pittsburgh; they do not treat us unfairly and meanly, and that is something, in this age and country, so conspicuous for its meanness and brutality toward those struggling in the cause of human rights.

From Pittsburgh we came to New Brighton¹²Douglass spoke in New Brighton, Pennsylvania, on 13 August 1847. Lib., 20 August, 10 September 1847. and held a meeting here, in the afternoon and evening. We were accompanied to this place by a number of friends from Pittsburgh; among the number was our friend Delany,¹³Born to a free mother and a slave father in Charlestown in western Virginia, Martin Robinson Delany (1812–85) was an editor, physician, and leading advocate of black emigration. In 1822 Delany and his mother moved to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, where his father later joined them, and the young Delany attended a local school. In 1831 he moved to Pittsburgh, where he worked as a barber, attended a school run by a black Methodist minister, and studied medicine. Between 1843 and 1847 Delany was editor of the Mystery, a black Pittsburgh newspaper. For the next two years he served as coeditor of Douglass’s North Star and lectured extensively to gain new subscriptions for that paper. In 1850 and 1851 Delany attended Harvard Medical College, but as a result of protests from white students the school denied him admission to the final term needed to complete his medical degree. The following year he wrote The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered, in which he argued that emigration was the only remedy for the oppressed condition of black Americans. When many black abolitionists, including Douglass, rejected Delany’s position, he organized a series of National Emigration Conventions that met in 1854, 1856, and 1858. These assemblies created a permanent National Board of Commissioners, of which Delany was president and chief propagandist. In 1856 Delany moved to Chatham, Canada West, and three years later he explored the Niger River Valley in Africa looking for possible emigration sites. His novel Blake was serialized in the Weekly Anglo-African from November 1861 through May 1862. During the Civil War Delany served the North first as a recruiter and examining surgeon and eventually as a major of the 104th U.S. Colored Troops. From 1865 to 1868 Delany was a Freedmen’s Bureau officer in South Carolina and later was active in that state’s politics, running unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor on the Independent Republican ticket in 1874. Martin R. Delany, Blake; or, The Huts of America, ed. Floyd J. Miller (Boston, 1970), ix; Thomas Holt, Black over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina during Reconstruction (Urbana, Ill., 1977), 74–75, 176–77; Dorothy Sterling, The Making of an Afro-American: Martin Robinson Delany, 1812–1885 (Garden City, N.Y., 1971); Victor Ullman, Martin R. Delany: The Beginnings of Black Nationalism (Boston, 1971); Miller, Search for a Black Nationality, 115–33, 171–83; DAB, 5:219–20. of the “Mystery,” Mr. I. B. Vashon, Dr. Peck,¹⁴David Jones Peck (c. 1827–?), an African American physician, was the son of Pittsburgh wigmaker and reformer John C. Peck. He was the first African American graduate of a U.S. medical school, completing his degree at Chicago’s Rush Medical College in 1847. Following graduation Peck briefly accompanied Douglass and Garrison on their western tour of Ohio. In 1848 Peck moved to Philadelphia, where he established a medical practice but faced opposition because of his race. He abandoned medicine in the 1850s and joined Martin R. Delany in an unsuccessful attempt to form a black republic in Nicaragua. NS, 4 February 1848; Merrill and Ruchames, Garrison Letters, 3:510–14, 514n; Leonard W. Johnson, “History of the Education of Negro Physicians,” Journal of Medical Education, 42:440 (May 1967); ANB, 17:222–23. Mr. Furguson,¹⁵Garrison described the same group, listing the same companions with the exception of Mr. Furguson. He did, however, note that the entourage included “others” from Pittsburgh. Merrill and Ruchames, Garrison Letters, 3:510–12. and George Vashon, Esq.¹⁶George Boyer Vashon (1824–78), the son of abolitionist John Bethune Vashon, was an African American attorney and educator. In 1838, upon the family’s move from Carlisle, Pennsylvania, to Pittsburgh, Vashon became secretary of the first youth-oriented abolition organization, the Juvenile Anti-Slavery Society. At sixteen he entered Oberlin College in Ohio and became the first African American to receive a bachelor of arts degree from that school upon his graduation in 1844. Then, from 1845 to 1847, Vashon studied with Pittsburgh lawyer Walter Forward. When denied admission to the bar in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, because of his race, Vashon moved to New York and became the first African American admitted to that state’s bar. In February 1848 Vashon emigrated to Haiti, where he became a regular correspondent to Douglass’s North Star, and taught Latin, Greek, and English at several schools and colleges. He returned to the United States to practice law in the fall of 1850. From 1854 to 1857, Vashon taught belles-lettres and mathematics at New York Central College in McGrawville, New York. Following the Civil War, he was the first African American teacher at Howard University and a solicitor for the Freedmen’s Bureau. In 1878, while teaching at Alcorn University in Rodney, Mississippi, Vashon died during a yellow fever epidemic. Washington (D.C.) National Era, 15 April 1847; Catherine M. Hanchett, “George Boyer Vashon, 1824–1878: Black Educator, Poet, Fighter for Equal Rights, Part One,” Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine, 68:205–10 (1985); DANB, 617. The last named gentleman bids fair to be of great service to his race. He is a man of good natural ability and a finished scholar. He is now about ready for the bar, having read law with one of the first lawyers of Pittsburgh, and here, to the everlasting shame of the professedly free State of Pennsylvania, be it spoken, this gentleman cannot be admitted to the bar on the ground that colored persons are not citizens of the State. Such infernal proscription ought to be handed around for universal execration.

My visit to Pittsburgh, gave me the first opportunity of seeing that truly noble specimen of a man, Mr. Delany. He is one of the most open, free,