For Frederick Douglass' Paper.

OUR PROVIDENCE CORRESPONDENCE

DEAR DOUGLASS:—The number of the Liberator received yesterday, contains the report of a "meeting of the colored citizens of Philadelphia." The speakers as reported, dealt out some hard hits at us, the "mean spirited and craven." I would notice the same, in the spirit, "that a light word shall not part us now."

The head and front, the tail and all of the meeting as reported seems to have been Purvis and Remond, and Remond and Purvis: I could but think that it would have been in better grace for those gentlemen to have given us, along with the citizens of Philadelphia, the benefit of their dignified denunciation, when the subject, which they now use to call it forth, (the Constitution of the United States,) was up for discussion before the late Convention held in that city.

These gentlemen's resolutions declare "that under the Constitution and government of the United States the colored people are nothing, and can be nothing but an alien, disenfranchised, and degraded class:" (why have not the gentlemen hurried up the proof of this?) I cannot see matters as they do, or rather as they represent in their resolutions. In reading the Constitution I cannot find the section that makes me an "alien, disenfranchised and degraded." I admit that there have been misrepresentations, false decisions and the like, on the part of the Judiciary and Government; which even friends are bolstering.—Permit me to call attention to the evidence given at this meeting by Purvis & Co., showing that the government can regard and treat us other than as aliens &c[.]; that it can treat us as "citizens of the United States." Purvis & Co., delcared that the executives of the government have admitted the same; and if the government has, and the Constitution does not interpose, the government may do so again. Did friend Purvis endeavor to obtain by stealth, that which he felt was not his own, when he solicited a passport in the name of ["]a citizen of the United States" under the "American Constitution and Government," and succeeded?

The second resolution in my judgment would have been more in accordance with facts to have represented that slavery would take in its grasping tendency, support in the Constitution; than to represent that it does legally and justly do: but I have a deeper regret in connection with this resolution: I allude to the lack of charity evinced in the latter part; wherein is insinuated, that certain friends because they are white, profes[s] certain views in as much as "they do not feel the iron heel," and desire "to please themselves."—Further comment can be passed thereon for Purvis & Co., say in another resolution, that the