For Frederick Douglass' Paper.

MEDINA, Mich., May, 1854.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS, ESQ: DEAR SIR:—Having had nothing better for many months than Free Soil milk and water pop, for political moral nourishment, I have almost starved, and, consequently become weak.

Enclosed I send you one dollar for your paper awhile, hoping thereby to gain strength. This Free Soil doctrine that "Congress has nothing to do with Slavery," don't set well in my mental stomach. How they reconcile such doctrine with the moral law, the Declaration of Independence, the rock on which the Constitution was built, and this clause in the Constitution—"The United States shall guaranty to the several States a republican form of government"—they have not informed me. Guess they won't.

When parents have nothing to do with bad conduct in their children—when police officers, magistrates and judges have nothing to do with theft, robbery, and murder, then, indeed, may Congress have nothing to do with slavery. Has the above pledge of the Constitution been sustained? Is that a republican form of government where one-fourth, one-half, or any number of persons are held (by what beings in the shape of men term law) as slaves? No! No!! How many slaves, Mr. Editor, think you there would now be in these United States, if we, the people, had sustained that truth which we know to be self-evident that all men are born free and equal—if we would regard the moral law, doing unto others as we would that others should do to us? Ah! not ONE.

I feel to bless the Lord that we may hope that He has, in his good providence to this nation, sent one man at least to Congress, (the Hon. Gerrit SmithSmith, Gerrit

Gerrit Smith (1797– 1874), a New York businessman and land speculator, became best known for his philanthropic work for such reform causes as temperance and abolition. Between 1828 and 1835, he donated large sums of money to the American Colonization Society, but abandoned that movement in 1835 when his sympathies shifted to the immediate abolitionists. In the 1840s, he gave approximately 140,000 acres of land in upstate New York to three thousand black settlers, thus qualifying them to vote. Smith was a founder and frequent candidate of the Liberty party, running for governor of New York on that ticket in 1840 and winning a seat in Congress in 1852. When the Free Soil merger with moderate antislavery Democrats and Whigs lured away many Liberty party supporters, Smith helped bankroll that organization until 1860. Smith befriended Douglass when the latter moved to Rochester, and Smith frequently helped finance Frederick Douglass’ Paper. Like Douglass, Smith supported John Brown, but psychological stress caused by the failure at Harpers Ferry brought on the first of a series of bipolar episodes that greatly reduced his subsequent reform activities. Ralph Volney Harlow, Gerrit Smith: Philanthropist and Reformer (1939; New York, 1972); Gerald Sorin, The New York Abolitionists: A Case Study of Political Radicalism (Westport, Conn., 1971), 269– 87; Lewis Perry, Radical Abolitionism: Anarchy and the Government of God in Antislavery Thought (Ithaca, N.Y., 1973), 170– 80; John R. McKivigan and Madeleine Leveille, “The ‘Black Dream’ of Gerrit Smith, New York Abolitionist,” Syracuse University Library Associates Courier, 20:61– 76 (Fall 1985); NCAB , 2:322– 23; DAB, 17:270– 71. ,) sound in politics and religion, to speak and vote for right and righteousness. Long may he live to do good to his people!

Yours respectfully,

STEPHEN SHAW.