F.D.P. 16 March, 1855 p.1 c.2-3

Colorphobia is fast abating in our Island
City, as a brief account of the doings of the
present week will show.

On Monday evening, C. W. Elliott, Esq.,
delivered a lecture before the New York Li
brary Association, in the hall of the Mercan
tile Library, late Astor Place Opera House,
on the life and character of Toussaint
L'Overture, the black hero of St. Domingo.
The lecture was a masterly production, evinc
ing much care and laborious study. A small
but intelligent audience listened attentively
to the thrilling account of the perils and vi
cissitudes of the noble negro. His rise from
slavery, to lead the armies and rule the coun-
cils of the black Republic—his patriotism,
his devotion to his country, his abnegation of
even paternal ties, his abduction, his exile
and melancholy death, were all truthfully
portrayed, bringing into striking constrast the
virtues and heroism of the brave black with
the treachery and cruelty of Abbott's idol,
the monster Napoleon.

The feature of the evening, however, was
the audience—small but intelligent and an
equal admixture of black and white. Side
by side sat they—no shrinking of the aris
tocratic white lady from companionship with
the black one. The white philanthropist,
Peter Cooper, sought an introduction to the
black savan, Dr. J. W. C. Pennington

Tuesday evening the concluding lecture of
the anti-slavery course was delivered by that
devoted friend of the slave Wm. Lloyd Gar
rison; and here was another mingling of the
races, Saxon and African in close proximity.
A large audience honored the man and the
occasion; and frequent bursts of applause
testified their appreciation of the scathing
review which the orator gave of Gen. Sam.
Houston's slavery speech in Boston. He
struck down the famous Indio-Anglo Saxon
President hunter with his own tomahawk,
and tore the scalp from his head with his own
knife. However much I may differ with 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. on certain points, which I do most
widely, I will ever honor him for his persist
ent advocacy of universal, unconditional
emancipation.

Wednesday evening I went to the new
Opera House, Academy of Music, Irving
Place. La Favorita was the Opera—Vestuali,
Lovini and Bachali the principal performers.
There is not much prejudice against color
among the upper Ten. Colorphobia is on
the move "above Bleecker." The Academy
of music is the resort of wealth and fashion
—the aristocratic place of amusement—but
here Democracy prevails: no "negro pew,"
no place for "respectable persons of color;"
the black amateur of music takes his seat
beside the white professor of la belle science.
The limits of my purse and modesty took
me into the amphitheatre or gallery, but I saw
a colored gentleman seated in the boxes.

Thursday evening the Black Swan (Miss
E. T. Greenfield) gave a concert at the Tab
ernacle, assisted by a colored gentleman of
rare musical abilities. From his appearance,
I should suppose he was an Africo-American,
but he is called, for effect, Indian Mario.—
The concert was well attended, and the ar
tists gave unbounded satisfaction. Here al
so the prevailing feature was a mixing up of

F.D.P. 16 March, 1855 p.1 c. 2-3

colors—ebony and topaz in equal propor
tions. The audience was composed of the
elite of both classes; and our ladies vied with
their fairer neighbors—if not in richness of
attire, at least in neatness of apparel, cor
rectness of deportment and personal attrac
tions.

Friday, Anthony Burns arrived in this city
in company with Rev. Mr. Grimes, of Bos-
ton, who went to Baltimore to purchase
Burns, for whose freedom he paid $1,300.—
A meeting was held that evening in Dr. Pen
nington's Church, to congratulate Burns on
his restoration to liberty. Mr. Burns gave a
succinct account of his escape from slavery,
his re-capture in Boston, his return to Vir
ginia, his imprisonment and suffering in Nor
folk and Richmond, his sale to Mr. McDon
ald of North Carolina, and his final redemp
tion through the instrumentality of Mr.
Grimes. In consequence of sufficient notice
not having been given, the audience was
small, probably not over one hundred per
sons; but here, too, was a beautiful illustra
tion of my proposition, that colorphobia is
abating; although in a colored church, and
the object of the meeting more particularly
interesting to colored people, the audience
consisted of as many white persons as col
ored.

Saturday evening the Black Swan gave an
other concert at the Tabernacle. The audi
ence was larger, and the diversity of colors
as great as at her first concert.

Miss Greenfield is truly a wonderful sing
er; she possess a flexibility of voice un
equalled in the musical world, compassing, it
is said, thirty-one clear notes. The Swan
has no particular forte, but her singing
embraces all styles of music. She sings with
equal facility the simple Ballad and the sci
entific Bravura; the Sacred Anthems of
Handel and the elaborate Cantatas of Bellini
are given by her with like sweetness and
power. Her range of voice includes Bass,
Baritone, Tenor, Contralto and Soprano.—
She was repeatedly encored. Indian Mario
also acquitted himself admirably. He sings
with much sweetness and feeling, but is, evi
dently, unaccustomed to public singing; his
voice is a rich, full tenor, not powerful, but
very melodious. He was encored in a Solo
from the Crown Diamonds, and gave us in
stead a beautiful gem from Fry's Leonora.

Thus, you see, art knows no distinction of
color, science recognizes no prejudice, edu
cation and wealth are the ladders by which
we must rise, the weapons with which we
can assail and conquer the demons, slavery
and prejudice.

Yours,
COSMOPOLITEBell, Philip A.

Philip A. Bell (1808-89) was educated at the New York City Free School and worked as an agent for the Liberator and at a variety of occupations in his youth. He was secretary of a January 1831 public meeting of New York blacks that protested against the colonization movement. In 1837 Bell helped found and edit the Weekly Advocate, later renamed the New York Colored American, which was an important forum for black opinion until its demise in 1842. In the 1850s he operated an employment agency for New York City blacks and was active in literary, temperance, and mutual relief societies as well as the antislavery movement. Bell attended many of the antebellum National Negro Conventions and lectured for equal suffrage for blacks. Moving to California in 1860, Bell briefly ran a real estate agency before returning to journalism, first as associate editor of the San Francisco Pacific Appeal, and later as owner and editor of the San Francisco Elevator. In the 1870s Bell was president of the Equal Rights League of California, a politically independent group that lobbied Republican politicians for better treatment of blacks. While still in New York, Bell wrote to the North Star under the pseudonym "Cosmopolite." New York Colored American, 8 December 1838; San Francisco Elevator, 12 June 1868, 11 January, 15 November 1873; William Lloyd Garrison, Thoughts on African Colonization: or; an Impartial Exhibition of the Doctrines, Principles and Purposes of the American Colonization Society (New York, 1832), 13- 17; Penn, Afro-American Press, 32-34, 94-98; Robert C. Dick, Black Protest: Issues and Tactics (Westport, Conn., 1974), 84, 173-77, 267; Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 20, 31, 95; Pease and Pease, They Who Would Be Free, 113-14, 175, 195, 210; James A. Fisher, "A History of the Political and Social Development of the Black Community in California, 1850-1950" (Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1971), 72-75, 97-100, 140-46; Freeman, "Free Negro in New York City," 35, 46, 128, 175-76, 237, 299; "Black Elites and the Draft Riots," New York Times, July 13, 2013. Autobiography, My Life and Times, Part 2 .
NEW YORK, March 3, '55