Springfield, Mass[.] 13 Jan[uary] 1856[.]

WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON ESQR.

MR GARRISON:

Sir. I find the following from your pen, in the last number of the “Standard,’'¹Douglass refers to an article published in the 12 January 1856 issue of the . Entitled “A Faithful Correction and Willing Acknowledgment,” the article, reprinted from the London , contains portions of a letter from William Lloyd Garrison to the editor of the . In the letter, Garrison takes issue with Douglass’s autobiography , and with his ill will toward Wendell Phillips, Garrison, and the Old Organization; in addition, he characterizes Douglass as ungrateful and disloyal to his friends. NASS, 12 January 1856; Douglass Papers, ser. 2, 2:417-18.— copied into that paper from the “”—published in London, England—and Edited by George Thompson Esqr.²George Thompson (1804-78), a leading Garrisonian abolitionist in Britain, was born in Liverpool, England. In 1833 he formed emancipation societies in Edinburgh and Glasgow. The following year, he began a fifteen-month speaking tour in the United States; mob violence from supporters of
slavery forced him to leave Boston secretly in 1835. Back in England, he again worked with British abolitionists. Thompson joined Douglass at a public meeting in Glasgow on 21 April 1840 to condemn the Free Church of Scotland’s fellowship with slaveholders. He later made two more visits to the United States on behalf of abolitionism. ., 29 May 1846; Garrison and Garrison, , 1:434-522, 2:1-72; Howard Temperley, (Columbia, S.C., 1972), 237-38; C. Duncan Rice, “The Anti-Slavery Mission of George Thompson to the United States, 1834-1835,” , 2:13-31 (April 1968); , 10:691.

My object in calling your attention to this last effort to injure, is respectfully to ask you (if not incompatable with your chosen mode of dealing with me) to point out in the pages of My Bondage and my freedom, the offensive portions of the Book to which you refer,³The London quoted a private letter from William Lloyd Garrison charging that , “in its second portion, is reeking with the virus of personal maliginity towards WENDELL PHILLIPS, myself, and the old organizationists generally, and full of ingratitude and baseness towards as true and disinterested friends as any man yet had on earth, to give him aid and encouragement.” London , 15 December 1855; , 22 February 1855, , ser. 2, 2:417. thus the readers of the “Standard” and the “Empire” may read and judge for themselves, of the justice of your denunciations—

Respectfully yours—

FREDERICK DOUGLASS.

ALS: William Lloyd Garrison Papers, MB.