[n.p.] 7 Dec[ember] 1856.¹Although Douglass supplied no year in dating this letter, John Brown was known to have passed through Rochester in December 1856 while traveling east from Kansas to raise funds in New York and New England. Franklin B. Sanborn, ed., , 2d. ed. (Boston 1891), 341, 443; Oates, , 224; Villard, , 270, 674.

My DEAR CAPTAIN BROWN.²John Brown.—

I am very busy at home. Will you please come up with my son Fred,³Born in Lynn, Massachusetts, Frederick Douglass, Jr. (1842-92) was the second son of Frederick and Anna Murray Douglass. Like his brothers, he was educated in Rochester’s public schools and learned the printer’s trade while assisting his father in the newspaper office. Unlike his brothers Lewis and Charles, however, Frederick Jr. did not enlist in the Union army. Instead, he acted as a recruiting agent for the Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth Massachusetts Infantry regiments. After the Civil War, Frederick Jr. tried but failed to gain membership in the typographical worker’s union in Washington, D.C. In 1866 he joined his brother Lewis in Denver, Colorado, and began working in the offices of the Red, White, and Blue Mining Company. While in Denver, Frederick Jr. received additional training as a typographer from his father’s old friend Henry O. Wagoner. He returned to Washington, D.C., in 1868, but racial prejudice again made it difficult for him to gain membership in the union. In 1870, Frederick Jr. joined his father at the , serving as the newspaper’s business manager. He was a frequent contributor of editorials to papers such as the Detroit , the New York , and the Baltimore . His efforts to gain public office, however, ended in failure with his unsuccessful 1873 campaign to be elected as a delegate to the Legislative Assembly of the District of Columbia. After the folded in 1874, Frederick Jr. worked as a court bailiff and later as a clerk in the Office of Records. , ser. 2, 3:274, 865, 910; , ser. 3, 1:126; McFeely, , 248-49, 272; , 1: 422-23. and take a mouthful with me?

In haste yours, truly,

FRED. DOUGLASS.

ALS: Dreer Collection, PHi