REBECCA WILLIAMSON¹Probably Rebecca Williamson Dresser (1828-1906), who was born to English immigrant parents in New Brunswick, Canada. She married Edwin Dresser (cofounder of the Standard Diary Company, which was later incorporated as the Cambridgeport Diary Company) in Charlestown, Massachusetts in 1859. A lifelong Unitarian, she was eulogized as “an abolitionist in the time when such opinions were unpopular.” Boston Christian Register, 4 January 1906; Molly McCarthy, The Accidental Diarist: A History of the Daily Planner in America (Chicago, 2013), 156-69, 200, 204, 244. TO FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Boston, [Mass.] 30 March 1856.

DEAR MR. DOUGLASS:—

A short time ago, I heard a lady (who spent several months last year in
Cuba) express very strong Pro-Slavery sentiments, and though I argued
with her to the best of my ability, I could not make her say that it was a
sin to hold our fellow creatures in bondage. I finally, asked her to go with
me on the next Sunday evening to Mr. Grimes’s²A free black born in Leesburg, Virginia, Leonard A. Grimes (1815-73), pastor of the Twelfth Baptist Church, spent his early years in Washington, D.C., where he worked for a butcher and a druggist. After traveling through the South in the employ of a slaveholder, Grimes returned to Washington and began actively participating in the movement to assist fugitive slaves. While working as a hackman, he was charged and convicted in the escape of a family of eight slaves and served two years in a Richmond prison. Upon his release, around 1845, he moved first to New Bedford, Massachusetts, and then to Boston, where from 1848 until his death he ministered to the Twelfth Baptist Church. Grimes frequently hosted abolitionist meetings at his church, and in 1851 unsuccessfully plotted to rescue the incarcerated fugitive Thomas Sims. In 1854 he organized the attempt by Boston merchants and brokers to buy the freedom of the imprisoned Anthony Burns. The effort failed, but in the following year Grimes traveled to Baltimore and ransomed Burns from his new owner. Grimes was unsuccessfully nominated for the post of chaplain to the Massachusetts legislature in 1864. Boston Commonwealth, 12 February 1864; William Wells Brown, The Rising Son; or, the Antecedents and Advancement of the Colored Race (Boston, 1874), 534-35; John Daniels, In Freedom’s Birthplace: A Study of the Boston Negroes (Boston, 1914), 64, 452; Pease and Pease, The Fugitive Slave Law, 39-41; Pease and Pease, They Who Would Be Free, 229; Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 82, 146, 206, 209.
Church. She went. It so
happened, that the Rev. Mr. Garnet³Henry Highland Garnet.
from Jamaica lectured that evening
on the subject of Jamaica, before Emancipation,⁴In 1833, Parliament passed the Slavery Abolition Act, which abolished slavery in the British West Indies. As stipulated by the act, all slaves under six years of age were freed on 1 August 1834, and all other slaves were made apprentices. Slaves who worked on the land were to serve a six-year apprenticeship before being granted their full freedom, and those who worked off the land were to serve a four-year apprenticeship. By 1838, however, the apprenticeship program had been deemed unworkable, and an Act of Emancipation granted full freedom to all former slaves on 1 August 1838. By 1844 nearly 20,000 former slave families had been settled on their own lands in Jamaica, and by 1859 it was estimated that there were roughly 50,000 black freeholders on the island. Gale L. Kenny, Contentious Liberties: American Abolitionists in Post-Emancipation Jamaica, 1834-1866 (Athens, Ga., 2010), 56; Sidney Mintz, “Labor and Sugar in Puerto Rico and Jamaica, 1800-1850,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 1:278 (March 1959). a lecture that was deeply
interesting to me, and I think must have interested all who heard it.

My friend, however, did not say much about it, although it was evident
that she was a good deal surprised to hear so able a production from a
black man.

The next day I carried to her “My Bondage and My Freedom,” and
asked her to read it carefully.

Yesterday she returned the book. I asked her how she liked it. “I can-
not tell you,” said she, “how much I liked it, but that you may know that
it has done some good, I mean to subscribe for Mr. Douglass’ paper." I
told her that was good proof enough. I wanted no better—so here is her
subscription for a year.

Please send the paper to Miss A. M. Anderson, Boston.

Yours, very respectfully,

REBECCA WILLIAMSON.

PLSr: FDP, 11 April 1856.