RICHARD BAXTER FOSTER¹Probably Richard Baxter Foster (1826-1901), an 1851 Dartmouth graduate who began teaching in Iowa in 1851. He was a supporter of the free-state cause in Kansas in 1856 and enlisted as a private in an Iowa regiment in the Civil War, but accepted a lieutenant’s commission of the 62nd Colored Infantry Regiment in 1863. After the war, he served as principal of the Lincoln Institute for black students in Jefferson City, Missouri, and as a Methodist minister. George T. Chapman, Sketches of the Alumni of Dartmouth College (Cambridge, Mass., 1867), 388; N[athan] F. Carter, The Native Ministry of New Hampshire (Concord, N.H., 1906), 322-23.
TO FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Richmond, Iowa. 28 Dec[ember] 1853[.]

MR. DOUGLASS:
DEAR SIR:—
I wish to take your paper for the coming year, but never having seen a
copy of it, do not know the terms. If you will enroll my name on the list of
your subscribers, and send me the paper, as soon as I receive a copy I will
forward the subscription price.²Douglass listed his subscription rates weekly on the second page of Frederick Douglass’ Paper as two dollars for a single copy per month sent for one year.

I have three special reasons for desiring to take your paper. 1. The
fact that a colored man can edit an able paper is standing demonstration
of the falsity of the principles by which the spirit of caste (on which slav
ery is founded) seeks to justify itself. I wish to know the nature and real
extent of that fact; and I wish, in my degree, to give encouragement and
sympathy to the man who rises above such dispiriting influences as crush
the colored race of this land. 2. I wish to take a paper that is committed
to the anti-slavery construction of the Constitution. For myself, I could
stand on Garrison’sGarrison, William Lloyd

William Lloyd Garrison (1805-79) was the foremost white abolitionist of the nineteenth century and was credited with the discovery of Douglass as a speaker at an antislavery meeting in Nantucket in 1841. He began his career as an apprentice printer on the Newburyport (Mass.) Herald at the age of thirteen. Garrison became editor of the Newburyport Free Press in 1826, but the paper closed within a year. He was then associated with a series of periodicals in Boston that advocated reform before Benjamin Lundy offered the young journalist the opportunity to write for his antislavery newspaper. Garrison joined Lundy in editing the Genius of Universal Emancipation in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1829, during the last year of the paper's 1821-1830 run. In 1830 a libel suit against the editors forced the paper to close and landed Garrison in jail. After his release, he courted the wealthy merchants of New York and Boston in order to start the Liberator (1831-65), a weekly journal based in Boston in which he advocated an immediate end to slavery. Garrison's brand of abolition condemned any institution that would tolerate the existence of slavery, including churches, political parties. and even the United States itself and any scheme aimed at removing black people from the country. Instead, Garrison hoped to raise the public's awareness that slavery was morally wrong and thereby force its end in an almost millennial moment of emancipation. His approach appealed to both white and black antislavery advocates but earned him many enemies among those only moderately opposed to slavery and slaveholders alike. Seeing the need for greater action and organization beyond the pages of the Liberator; Garrison joined with other abolitionists to form the New England Anti-Slavery Society in 1831. Two years later he helped found the larger American Anti-Slavery Society. In 1833 he established ties with English abolitionists after a trip to Great Britain, and he later brought the noted and notorious speaker George Thompson to the United States for a tour. Garrison also dedicated himself to women's rights, encouraging women to enter the public sphere by inviting them, via the Liberator, to form female antislavery societies. In addition to the thirty-three women's antislavery societies that flourished by 1838, Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society welcomed women as well as blacks into its ranks. However, female delegates were excluded from the World's Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840 in London. The issue of women's participation in the antislavery movement and Garrison's absolute refusal to turn to politics to end slavery caused a division in the American Anti-Slavery Society. Brothers Lewis and Arthur Tappan, who opposed women's acting as speakers and who hoped to use politics toward abolition, broke with Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society, forming the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, or the "New Organization" in 1841. Garrison's ideas were so closely associated with the "Old Organization" that the American Anti-Slavery Society became known simply as the "Garrisonians." With the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, Garrison believed that he had accomplished his life's work and that of the antislavery movement. He then resigned from the presidency of the American Anti-Slavery Society and closed the Liberator. Wendell Phillips Garrison and Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879: The Story of His Life Told by His Children, 4 vols. (New York, 188589); Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York, 1998); James Brewer Stewart, William Lloyd Garrison and the Challenge of Emancipation (Arlington Heights, Ill., 1992); John L. Thomas, The Liberator: William Lloyd Garrison (Boston, 1963); Dictionary of American Biography, 20 vols. (New York, 1928-36), 7:168-72. platform³ In May 1844, the American Anti-Slavery Society, which had been under the control of followers of William Lloyd Garrison since 1840, adopted a resolution calling for Northern secession from the Union as a means of depriving the institution of slavery of outside support. Garrison and his followers believed that the Constitution was an immoral covenant that allowed compromise with the South, thus perpetuating slavery. Garrisonians found their disunionist position an extremely effective propaganda device with which to castigate Northerners for their complicity with slavery, which, they claimed, stemmed from cooperation with the South under what they deemed the “proslavery” U.S. Constitution. Stanley Harrold, American Abolitionists (New York, 2001), 35-36; Walter M. Merrill, Against Wind and Tide: A Biography of William Lloyd Garrison (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), 204-06; Perry, Radical Abolitionism, 161-66.
with reference to that point, sooner than
I could on Mann’s;⁴The noted American education reformer Horace Mann (1796-1859) was the youngest son of a yeoman farmer from Franklin, Massachusetts. Admitted to the Massachusetts bar in 1823, Mann practiced law in Dedham and Boston until 1833, and was elected to the Massachusetts General Court (1827-33). From 1833 to 1837 he served in the state senate, advocating state care for the insane and manifesting an interest in educational reform. As secretary (1837-48) of the Massachusetts Board of Education, the first such institution in the country, and as editor (1838-48) of his semimonthly Common School Journal, Mann promoted a tax-supported system of public school education, seeing a nonsectarian common school education as an economic leveler and the foundation of democratic government. In 1848, Mann, a Whig, succeeded John Quincy Adams as representative for Massachusetts’s eighth congressional district, and two years later he was reelected as a Free Soiler. In. Congress, Mann was an outspoken opponent of the extension of slavery in the territories and, thus, opposed the 1850 compromise measures. During the last years of his life, Mann acted as the first president (1852-59) of Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Horace Mann, Slavery: Letters and Speeches (Boston, 1853), 225, 324; Jonathan Messerli, Horace Mann: A Biography (New York, 1972); Ernest Cassara, “Reformer as Politician: Horace Mann and the Anti-Slavery Struggle in Congress, 1848-1853,” Journal of American Studies, 5:247—63 (December 1971); Larry Gara, “Horace Mann: Antislavery Congressman,” Historian, 32:19-33 (November 1969); ACAB, 4:190-91; NCAB, 3:78-79; DAB, 12:240-43. but I like Goodell’s⁵In the early 1840s, the Reverend William Goodell (1792-1878) began advocating the position that the U.S. Constitution should be interpreted as an antislavery document. Most likely, he had been converted to this position by his fellow New York political abolitionist Alvan Stewart. Goodell’s Views of American Constitutional Law, in Its Bearing upon American Slavery (Utica, N.Y., 1844) was soon seconded by Lysander Spooner’s The Unconstitutionality of Slavery (Boston, 1845). Goodell’s and Spooner’s constitutional interpretation became a fundamental principle for the small post-1848 Liberty party faction led by Gerrit Smith, which Douglass later joined. William M. Wiecek, The Sources of Antislavery Constitutionalism, 1760-1848 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1977), 250-75; Meyer Leon Perkal, “William Goodell: A Life of Reform” (Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 1972), 213-22. better than either. I know that

as Garrison says, if you are right “the courts have all been wrong—the
legislative assemblies all wrong—the decisions of the constitutional ex
pounders all wrong—the people, with out distinction of party, for more
than sixty years, all wrong in regard to the design and spirit of the Federal
Constitution"⁶Probably not a direct quotation from William Lloyd Garrison, but a characterization of his view that the U.S. Constitution condoned and protected the institution of slavery. EAAH, 2:716-17.
—yet I agree with you and disagree with all these for three
reasons: 1. I must make the Constitution anti-slavery, or refuse to vote,
and so lose the voice of a citizen, which I wish to make heard against
the usurpations of the slave power. 2. The words of the instrument—the
history of its formation—the fundamental principles of all law and all
government—and the Declaration of Independence, equally binding with
the Constitution—all allow, all compel me to do so. I think the Free De
mocracy of the West—I mean Illinois, lowa and Wisconsin—are ready
to take your ground. 3. My third reason for wishing your paper, is, that I
want to be thoroughly informed of Gerrit Smith’s course in Congress. I
am looking to see his course constitute as important an era in our national
legislation as J. Q. Adams⁷The eldest son of John Adams, John Quincy Adams (1767-1848) served as the American ambassador to the Netherlands, Berlin, Russia, and England during the early years of the Republic. He also held office as U.S. senator from Massachusetts (1803-08), secretary of state in James Monroe’s cabinet (1817-25), and president of the United States (1825-29). From 1831 until his death, Adams sat in the U.S. House of Representatives, where he opposed slavery and its extension and fought the “gag rule” on abolitionist petitions. In late 1831, he made his first antislavery speech on the floor of Congress, introducing fifteen petitions from Pennsylvania Quakers praying for the abolition of slavery and the slave trade in the District of Columbia. Adams defended a band of captured Africans before the Supreme Court in the Amistad case in 1841. Despite his association with the abolitionist cause, Adams said that he personally favored ending only the slave trade. Samuel F. Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Union (New York, 1956); Leonard L. Richards, The Life and Times of Congressman John Quincy Adams (New York, 1986); Paul C. Nagel, John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, a Private Life (New York, 1997). did.

Pardon me for writing at such length. I thought, as you probably have
few subscribers in Iowa, you might like to know with what motives a
stranger, at such a distance sent for your paper.

Yours truly,

R. B. FOSTER.

PLSr: FDP, 13 January 1854.