PHILADELPHIA, Penn.,

May 30th, 1857

FREDERICK DOUGLASS, ESQ.—DEAR SIR:—We have never yet been able to see why Philadelphians should not plead guilty to the charge that theirs is the most intensely negro-hating city in the Union. When we trace as we do sometimes in every form and feature, an expression of utter indifference, if not contempt, on the part of many of our influential Saxon citizens, toward the colored; it looks to us very much as if every day were a step from a recognition of our manhood. There is hardly a public place into which a colored man can go, assured that he will not be insulted, ordered out, or perchance, dragged out like a brute. An appeal to the law avails him nothing but the chagrin and mortification of defeat and paying costs of suit. Be it known, however, that amidst all this, there are but a few of these public places, that have had the courage to announce and advertise themselves as
proscribers of colored visitors; this work is generally done by menial, unscrupulous door-keepers with a horde of policemen at their backs. One of these few is Musical Fund Hall. It is one of the most uncompromisingly, unflinchingly pro-slavery nests in all christendom. "No colored person will ever be admitted to the Hall as one of an audience," has been published broadcast as its faith. The Colonization Society held its annual meeting there a short time since. We were honored with a ticket, and thinking it an admirable opportunity for stirring up the matter afresh, we with a friend of a hue like our own, went, fully anticipating an unpleasant sequel. On entering we were politely received; and speedily ushered into the "Ladies Dressing Room," where we found Bishop Potter and several of his clerical friends chattering and preparing business. Some of them were quite flattering in their attention to us.—At length the hour for opening arrived, and we were honored with an invitation to take a seat upon the platform, which we promptly declined. We assured all concerned that unless our tickets were taken at the door for the entrance of the audience and ourselves allowed to pass in as did others of the audience, we should decline to enter at all.—We went to the door, where we were sternly refused admittance. "You cant go in here!" said a surly looking doorkeeper anxious, no doubt to show his loyalty. We demanded the reasons.—"The rules of the Institution are imperative and leave no choice," replied he in a highly excited and decided manner, as if he would tear us asunder for our "negro impudence" in presuming to question him. Certain of the Society saw the position they would be placed in, by our being driven away, interposed, and after some little parleying, we were admitted on our own terms before set forth. The only thing worthy of note in the proceedings of the meeting, was the speech

of ex-Gov. J. B. Pinney. We have seldom heard a more eloquent denunciation of color-phobia; and then to know [illegible] as being pronounced in the stronghold of prejudice, made it doubly pleasing to us. "I started day before yesterday," said he, "in company with a colored gentleman to go from New York to Baltimore. I had scarcely quitted the shores of New York before the colored man was ordered into the forward car. I then protested and asked if the car we were in was not car A, showing our tickets. But the conductor was inexorable and my colored friend had finally to "obey orders." I followed and found in the car which was a miserable and filthy concern, besides being uncomfortable, hung up all the letters A, B, C. &c., so that it were quite impossible for any one to get a ticket that would not answer to it. Disgusted and indignant at the meanness meted out to us on the cars, we arrived in Philadelphia. To ride over to the Baltimore Depot, I jumped into an omnibus, asked my colored friend to follow, and was making room for him; when he was about to enter, the driver thundered out "get out of there, you nigger: you come up here on the outside." My cheeks tingled with shame at your city of brotherly love. We are talking about elevating the colored race in Liberia to the dignity of an independent nation, when in the very heart of civilization here, you have not yet elevated them to the dignity of a seat in an omnibus. (applause.) We must not shut our eyes to the fact that we are wronging and outraging a brother man in our petty acts of tyranny and prejudice toward him. We owe him an education and elevation here." Thus the Governor continued, meeting applause at nearly every one of his eloquent and burning sentences.

We have no sympathy whatsoever with the Colonization Society as such; but we should most certainly like to have Gov. Pinney give this speech in every Music Fund Hall from this Atlantic shore to the valley of the Mississippi and beyond the Rocky Mountains. Indeed we were quite taken aback at such noble sentiments coming from a Colonizationist, in such a place.

Wm. Wells Brown has read his two dramas here in "Samson st. Hall," to rather small audiences.—"The Doughface Baked" is a drama of Mr. B's which is well gotten up; its ground work is good Mr. B. reads it with good effect. But we may be allowed to question the amount of good effected by it and similar performances. Slavery is a great concrete reality, and as such it seems to us best to deal with it. We can see about it to make sport of. The slave dialect and plantation grammar necessarily bro't into a piece like Mr. B's, are not in our opinion, calculated to soften prejudice or do away with the absurd notion among white men, that colored men are not fit associates for them. But to hear the drama and witness the tact and ingenuity displayed in

its composition, are so far as that is concerned, well worth the time and money of an admirer of literary attainment in the colored race.

Mr. B. had some very intelligent looking persons in his audience, small though it was, among which we saw William Lloyd 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. .

Franklin Pierce was amongst us a short time but he failed to make anything of a sensation.—He put up at the La Pierre House. One night, a few boys and young men got together, went to the La Pierre, and called for Mr. P., who readily enough came forward and delivered himself of some labored, prosy sentences. Next morning The Pennsylvanian came out with a flaming caption "Great speech of ex-President Pierce," at which everybody who heard Frank's oration must have had a hearty laugh. We hope now that it is settled forever that ex Presidents of the United States are not worth much in Philadelphia.

"NORMAL."