Rochester[, N.Y.] 10 Oct[ober] 1863.

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.

MY DEAR SIR:
I am this day from NewYork where I have been during the last three weeks
bending over the Sick bed of my Dear Son LewisDouglass, Lewis Henry

Lewis Henry Douglass (1840-1908), the second child and eldest son of Frederick and Anna Murray Douglass, was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Educated in the schools of Rochester, New York, he learned the printer's trade as a boy working in the North Star office. In 1863 he enlisted in the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry, serving as the regiment's sergeant major and seeing action at the Battle of Fort Wagner, South Carolina, in July I863. Disabled, he was discharged in 1864. He was a member, along with his father, of the black delegation that interviewed President Andrew Johnson on 7 February 1866. Later that year, after failing to obtain employment as a printer in Rochester because of racial discrimination, he moved to Colorado. There he briefly worked for the Denver Daily Gazette until refused membership in the local printers' union because he was “a colored man." In 1869 he took employment as a compositor at the Government Printing Office in Washington, D.C. When he attempted to join the Columbia Typographical Union, No. 100, a controlling minority of the membership blocked his election at their May 1869 meeting. For the record, the opposition was based not on his color but on reports that Douglass had “ratted” (worked as a nonunion printer for below-scale wages) in Denver. Dougla,s. who remained at the Printing Office throughout his widely publicized effort to break the union's color barrier, denied the allegation but to no avail. The factionalized union continued to table his application along with those of other black printers (including Frederick Douglass, Jr.) as late as 1871. By then Lewis and Frederick, Jr., had become publishers of the Washington New [National] Era, of which their father was the editor. In 1872-73 Lewis Douglass served on the Legislative Council of the District of Columbia. By the 1890s he was a successful realtor in his adopted city. On 7 October 1869 he married Helen Amelia Loguen, daughter of Reverend Jermain W. Loguen. Lewis H. Douglass to Frederick Douglass, 29 October 1866, General Correspondence File, reel 2, frames 220-22, FD Papers, DLC; Lewis H. Douglass to D. W. Flynn, 24 May 1869, in San Francisco Elevator, 11 June 1869; NASS, 22 May 1869; Rochester Union and Advertiser, 6 August 1869; William H. Boyd, comp., Boyd’s Directory of the District of Columbia, . . . 1873 (Washington, D.C. 1873), 525; Boyd's Directory, 1893, 371; James M. Gregory, Frederick Douglass, the Orator (1893; New York, 1971), 102-03; Foner and Lewis, Black Worker, 1: 370, 374-83. , who has been until now
quite too ill to be removed home.¹Lewis received a furlough to travel from Hilton Head, South Carolina, to New York City to obtain medical treatment. He arrived in New York in September 1863 and consulted with two black physicians, J. F. Chauveau and his father’s longtime friend James McCune Smith. Their assessment for the military authorities stated that Lewis was seriously ill from “diarrhea, cachexy (cachexia) and spontaneous gangrene of left half of scrotum.” They recommend several months of recuperation before a return to active duty. An U.S. Army surgeon later examined Lewis in Boston and found him “incapable of performing the duties of a soldier because of a scrotal gangrenous now a fistulous opening.” Douglass traveled to New York City to attend to his ill son. He and his friend Ottilie Assing visited Lewis daily for approximately two weeks. Robert Ewell Greene, Swamp Angels: A Biographical Study of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment: True Facts about the Black Defenders of the Civil War (Madison, Fla., 1990), 87-88; Diedrich, Love across Color Lines, 254. My absence will explain my silence.
Lewis left Morris Island on a furlough granted him for “good Conduct in
the field”—and will return to his post as soon as his health is restored.²Lewis never fully recovered his health and was discharged from the Fifty-fourth in May 1864. Lewis H. Douglass to FD, 22 August 1864; Greene, Swamp Angels, 87-88. I
was in hopes when Dear RoseSprague, Rosetta Douglass

Rosetta Douglass Sprague (1839–1906), the first child of Anna and Frederick Douglass, was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, on 24 June 1839. In her childhood, Rosetta wrote and read letters for her mother, whom she assisted with housework and with piecework for the shoe factories in Lynn, Massachusetts. Her father sent Rosetta to school at age seven in Albany, New York, where she lived with Abigail and Lydia Mott. When the Douglass family moved to Rochester, Rosetta began attending the Seward Seminary, where her presence offended the parents of one of the white students and led to her segregation from the other pupils. Her father, in a fury, removed Rosetta from the school and hired a private tutor for his daughter. Rosetta, along with her three brothers, then led other students in the efforts to desegregate Rochester’s public school system. From 1854 to 1855, Rosetta attended Oberlin College preparatory school, one of the first institutions of higher education to accept African Americans and women. She became a teacher in Philadelphia and Salem, Massachusetts, until her marriage in 1863 to Nathan Sprague, with whom she had seven children. Before her death in 1906, she wrote a memoir of her mother that remains one of the most complete documents of Anna Murray Douglass’s life. Rosetta Douglass Sprague, My Mother as I Recall Her: A Paper Read before the Anna Murray Douglass Union, W.C.T.U., May 10, 1900 (1900; Washington, D.C., 1923); Dorothy Sterling, ed., We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1984), 132–45; Ellen N. Lawson and Marlene Merrill, “The Antebellum ‘Talented Thousandth’: Black College Students at Oberlin before the Civil War,” Journal of Negro Education, 52: 145 (Spring 1983); Miriam DeCosta-Willis, “Smoothing the Tucks in Father’s Linen: The Women of Cedar Hill,” Sage, 4: 30–33 (Fall 1987); Sylvia Lyons Render, “Afro-American Women: The Outstanding and the Obscure,” Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress, 32: 306–10 (October 1975), 307–10. ³Rosetta Douglass. told me in a letter—that a note had arrived
from you—she would have mentioned my absence—but she did not open
it till last night—Hoping to See you on Tuesday—

As ever Yours Very Truly

FRED’ K DOUGLASS—

ALS: Gerrit Smith Papers, NSyU.