W. L. CRANDAL¹W. L. Crandall was superintendent of the Onondaga County schools in 1850. He also reported on the trial of Henry Allen, a sheriff tried for arresting a fugitive slave. In the 1840s he had been one of the publishers of the Onondaga Standard. Syracuse Daily Journal, 30 May 1851; Edward Smith, A History of the Schools of Syracuse from Its Early Settlement to January 1, 1893 (Syracuse, N.Y., 1893), 59; J. H. French, Gazetteer of the State of New York (Syracuse, N.Y., 1860), 475. TO FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Syracuse, [N.Y.] 10 Dec[ember]1853.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS :—
I thank you, in the name of Freedom, for the counterblast in your paper of
to-day,²Articles from the Liberator, the National Anti-Slavery Standard, the Pennsylvania Freeman, and the Anti-Slavery Bugle were reprinted in the 9 December 1853 issue of Frederick Douglass’ Paper under the heading “Spirit of the Garrisonians.” All were critical of Douglass, accusing him of withdrawing from the Garrisonians because of changes in his political opinion about slavery and the Constitution; of making false accusations against Wendell Phillips, Edmund Quincy, Robert Purvis, C. Lenox Remond, and William L. Nell; of transferring his allegiance to political abolitionists such as Gerrit Smith, William Goodell, and Samuel R. Ward; and of treachery and public displays of hostility toward Garrison and his friends. Douglass was also censured for his endorsement of accusations of religious infidelity made against Henry C. Wright, Parker Pillsbury, and Stephen S. Foster. Douglass responded to these criticisms in the same issue of Frederick Douglass’ Paper. In a lengthy editorial entitled “The Liberator, A. S. Standard, Penn. Freeman, A. S. Bugle—William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass; or A Review of Anti-Slavery Relations," Douglass accused his critics of forming a conspiracy to discredit him. Douglass asserted that he was not ungrateful to his Garrisonian mentors. Rather, he had experienced a reversal of opinion that was not popular among his former associates. Douglass denied accusations that he had political ambitions, and assured his readers that he was not attempting to take over the antislavery movement and its funds. In general, Douglass suggested that the Garrisonians were responsible for escalating the controversy. FDP, 9 December 1853. to the outrageous calumnies, detractions, and wholly unchristian
attacks on you in the Liberator,³William Lloyd Garrison published the weekly Boston newspaper the Liberator from 1831 to 1865. The paper advocated women’s rights, temperance, pacifism, and a variety of other reforms in addition to immediate emancipation. Thomas, Liberator, 127-28, 436; DAB, 7:168-72.
Anti-Slavery Standard,⁴The American Anti-Slavery Society published the New York-based National Anti-Slavery Standard as the society’s official publication from 1840 to 1870. Dillon, The Abolitionists, 213. and Pennsylvania Freeman.⁵A weekly abolitionist newspaper published in Philadelphia between 1836 and 1854, the Pennsylvania Freeman was the official organ of the Eastern Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society. Early editors included Benjamin Lundy and John Greenleaf Whittier; later editors included Charles C. Burleigh, James Miller McKim, Mary Grew, Oliver Johnson, and Cyrus M. Burleigh. The journal advocated Garrisonian reforms, but was more moderate in its editorial style, in keeping with the views of the Quaker-dominated membership of the organization. John W. Blassingame, Mae G. Henderson, and Jessica M. Dunn, eds., Antislavery Newspapers and Periodicals, 5 vols. (Boston, 1980-84), 3:57-59; Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, 3:391-92n. From the outset, I knew they had mistaken their mission;
that they were not raised up of God or the Devil to break down Frederick
Douglass; and for the very good reason,[]that, in these latter days, the
weaker are not anointed to break down the stronger. Now, as to the absurd
non-resistant, non-voting notions of these people, I have neither objection
nor criticism; it is a matter for them; but as to their infernal attacks on you,
I have something to say. The decencies of our half-civilization, are to be
observed, even towards those who do not belong to the “Superior Class”

of our charity-loving, kind, and merciful American Society. Yes, Mr. GarrisonGarrison, 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. ;⁶William Lloyd Garrison. you must understand, that when your “non-resistant” pen, can trace the lines on the hearth stone, for matter to point your calumnies against one you hate, every decent man in Christendom, has an interest in what
you say. And, for shame! [T]o thus assault a member of a down-trodden race, who, in the same breath, you declare: are not capable of perceiving
the “demands,” or of understanding the “philosophy of the operation” that is to take the hands of cowardly villains from off their throats!

Your article of to-day, will endear you to thousands; for they know there is noble work for you, with them, to do. Self-respect demanded it.
Again you have the thanks of your friend.

W. L. CRANDAL.

PLSr: FDP, 16 December 1853.