LOCKPORT, April 15, 1854.

DEAR DOUGLASS:—A number of times I thought I must write a few lines for your paper, but from one cause or another I put it off. My remarks will be short and dissultory.

When 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. & Co were flagilating [sic] you, I felt like talking; however, you passed thro' that ordeal without needing a helping hand, especially from one so feeble as the writer.—Partdon me, when I say in some respects, I consider it a happy occurence, in thoroughly convincing you, and the community at large, that they are a peculiar class of proscriptionists, uniting in their efforts to annihilate any and every person who dare differ with them in sentiment, or use any instrumentality not according with their notions. However, in one respect, they show themselves Democratic; they neither spare white or black, bond or free. All who do not subscribe to the Anti-Slavery Divinity of their Society, are pro-slavery infidels. I sometimes think it is well they have banded together, to talk against slavery; for if such characters happened to be slaveholders, Legree would be outrivalled.

When that Irish slaveholder, Mitchel, was receiving a merited castigation from the press, I felt like putting on the lash. I now think the less his putrid carcass is disturbed, the better.

A few words with regard to the slavery question. The agitation in Congress on the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, is waking up the North. I fear it will not be lasting. The slave power has not yet thoroughly and understandingly touched the Northern conscience. That conscience lies in the pocket. When that is rifled, then will the people of the North wake up? A mighty conversion will follow. The sin of slavery will be spoken of in plain language. Such speeches as yours will then be considered of rather the dough-faced order; then it will be war to the knife, and the knife to the hilt. Touch a Yankee's pocket and you insult his God, and then his prayers, ballots—yes, and even his blood will cry atone, atone, ATONE!

From present appearances, I think the Hunkers and Silvers intend going together next fall. The Seward Whigs intend holding on to the old Whig party; and their game is to nominate Wm. H. Seward for Governor, expecting by so doing to sop up the Free Democratic vote. It is an old saying, and true as old, to be forewarned is to be fore-armed. The Whig Party out of power at the North always make strong anti-slavery professions; but in power, even with their abolition Fillmore at their head, they go slavery to the dregs. Now, it is out of no love to Seward that he will be nominated. No, no. He has been too anti slavery for national Whiggery in the Senate, therefore he must not be sent again; but he will answer to make a stool pigeon of to bring anti-slavery men to the Whig party. A man of the calibre of ex-Governor Hunt (if not himself) must go to the Senate. This is the ordeal through which the Free Democrats are to pass next fall. Some, perhaps, will be deceived, thinking by voting for Mr. Seward, they will be helping the cause of freedom—when in reality, it is far otherwise, as the object of the wire pullers is to send a more malable [sic] tool to the Senate, and destroy the anti-slavery cause in the State.

I wish, dear Douglass, you would keep an eye to this matter, for I have no doubt such a project is now in embryo.

JOHN ROBERTS.