Richard Baxter Foster to Frederick Douglass, December 28, 1853
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’s 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.