FREDERICK DOUGLASS TO GERRIT SMITH

Rochester[, N.Y.] 2 July 1860.

HON GERRIT SMITH
MY DEAR FRIEND:
I am glad to receive your note of this morning,¹Smith’s note to Douglass has not been located. and Sincerely thank you
for your draft for twenty dollars, being the Second twenty you have sent
me Since I got home. Did I see my way to keep the weekly going, I would
gladly retain the draft, but the paper must go down²The final issue of Frederick Douglass’ Paper appeared on 29 June 1860. and I therefore return
your drafts. I am as deeply grateful to you as if I retained it. During the
last six months my weekly has been running behind its income at the rate
of from $25 to $30 per week. On finding its low condition when I got
home I at once decided to stop on the first of June—and said as much in
the paper—but during the first week in june there was owing to the ap-
peal made to the readers and friends of the paper, such an[]improvement
in the reciepts that I ventured to assure its readers that the paper would be
continued. Since then, however, the receipts have fallen nearly to nothing
while the expenses stand as forti[]five and fifty dollars per week. Under
these circumstances I See nothing for me but to let the paper go down.

You may well believe that after nearly thirteen years of efforts to put
the paper on a permanent bases and make it an established AntiSlavery
instrumentality, that I am now very Sorry to give up the struggle. There
is no escape and I submit. I shall here after only publish my monthly pa-
per—lI shall look with interest for your letter in the “Principia[.|”³The Principia, sometimes titled the National Principia, was a New York City antislavery weekly newspaper published by William Goodell from 1859 to 1864. It was the successor to his Radical Abolitionist, which had been the official organ of the moribund American Abolition Society. In the late 1850s, Goodell and his longtime patron Gerrit Smith quarreled over theological issues, since the latter publicly embraced a “religion of reason.” Harlow, Gerrit Smith, 383-90; Perkal, “William Goodell,” 293-98. I can-t
Support Lincoln⁴The Illinois politician Abraham Lincoln (1809-65), a Whig turned Republican, was sworn in as the sixteenth president of the United States on 4 March 1861. Upon meeting Lincoln at the White House in 1863, Douglass was charmed by the president’s earnest political considerations of emancipation. A year later, Lincoln granted Douglass’s request that his son Charles be discharged from the army due to illness. In a private meeting on 19 August 1864, Lincoln and Douglass discussed stepping up efforts to recruit slaves to the Union’s cause. Lincoln was elected to a second term in November 1864, and Douglass attended his inauguration festivities. James M. McPherson, Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution (New York, 1990), 109, 134-35, 139; Phillip Shaw Paludan, The Presidency of Abraham Lincoln (Lawrence, Kans., 1994), 4-5, 15-16, 183, 285-87; McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 229-35.—but whether there is life enough in the Abolitionists to
name a Candidate I cannot say—I shall look to your letter⁵In his characteristic fashion, Smith took the occasion to reply to Douglass in a printed broadside letter distributed to veteran political abolitionists and the press. Smith assailed the low antislavery standards of the Republican party and called on abolitionists to stand by their principles. [Gerrit Smith] Gerrit Smith to Frederick Douglass, 13 July 1860 (Peterboro, N.Y., 1860), n.p.; McPherson, Struggle for Equality, 17-18. for light on the
pathway of duty.