FREDERICK DOUGLASS TO WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

Rochester, [N.Y.] 15 Oct[ober] 1860.

MR 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. :

You will oblige me by allowing me to say in your columns, that the letter of ‘J. A. H.’ which appeared in the of Sept. 28,¹A letter from “J.A.H.,” reporting on the Political Abolition Convention in Worcester, appeared in the Boston ’s issue of 12 October 1860. A second letter from this correspondent, dated 28 October 1860, expands on the original reporting of Douglass’s participation in that convention. ., 2 November 1860. did me injustice in the part it represented me as having taken in the proceedings of the recent Political Abolition Convention held in Worcester. Neither Mr. Foster²Stephen S. Foster. nor I undertook the formidable work which your correspondent in his letters ascribed to us. I beg to assure you, ‘the annihilation of the American Anti-Slavery Society’ was no part of the business of that Convention. The language of your correspondent is much too strong. It conveys an exaggerated idea of what took place on the occasion it purports to describe. Every body knows, that to criticise the position of an association in respect to a single point in its plan of operation, is a very different thing from discrediting an association altogether, and working for its destruction. I plead guilty to the first, but not to the last impeachment. There is no good reason for misrepresenting even an enemy, if I must be deemed such. I did freely dissent from one of your leading doctrines, and did my best to prove it unsound; but in no such spirit as would be inferred from the language of your Worcester correspondent. My objection to the American Anti-Slavery Society respected its , not its life. So far from working for the annihilation of that Society, I have never failed, in the worst times of my controversy with it, to recognise that organization as the most efficient generator of anti-slavery sentiment in the country. And this I did repeatedly at the Worcester Convention. The compliment which ‘J. A. H.’ pays Mr. Howland³Joseph Avery Howland (1826–89) was from Worcester, Massachusetts. He lived in Boston for some time, where he worked in the textile industry. Howland lectured as an agent of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society and was a secretary for the 1857 New England Anti-Slavery Convention. Howland’s disagreement with Douglass was over the former’s strong support for the Garrisonian doctrine of “disunionism.” Merrill and Ruchames, , 4:456–57. for the part he took in the Convention is, perhaps, natural, but scarcely modest, since the complimentor and the complimented are one and the same person. If manliness consists in calling a man a liar to his face, or what is about the same thing, telling him he knows he tells a falsehood, I must prefer manners to manliness. To me, Mr. Howland’s manners and language on that occasion, and of which he now strangely boasts in the , were better becoming a slave plantation among slaves, than an Anti-Slavery Convention among equals.

What had I said to call forth this ill-mannered charge of falsehood from Mr. Howland? Why, in substance this: That the plan of operation adopted by the American Anti-Slavery Society did not embrace the abolition of slavery by means of the Government, and that the Radical Abolition party was the only organization which proposed such abolition. This is what I said, and what I meant to say. Mr. Howland, by suppressing or forgetting a part of what I did say, and adding a little which I did not say, makes out a case of falsehood against me. His zeal has in this instance outrun his discretion, and I leave him to retrace his steps in regard to me, as I am happy to see he has done in the case of Mr. Higginson.⁴Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823–1911) of Cambridge, Massachusetts, was a Harvard educated reformer, Unitarian minister, and soldier. Born into a prominent but recently impoverished merchant family, Higginson taught school in 1843 and 1844 in between two four-year stints at Harvard. Upon graduation from Harvard Divinity School in 1847, Higginson, already deeply committed to abolition and women’s rights, secured a pastorate at the First Religious Society of Newburyport, Massachusetts. His reform activities and his Free Soil candidacy for Congress caused a breach with the congregation in 1850. After 1852 he preached at the Free Church in Worcester. Never a pacifist, Higginson took part in slave rescues and attempted rescues in the Boston area in the early 1850s. He made two trips west in order to support Free Kansas forces in 1856, and he eventually met John Brown, for whose raid on Harpers Ferry he later raised funds. During the Civil War, Higginson served for eighteen months as the commanding colonel of the First South Carolina Volunteers, the first black regiment in the United States. After the war, Higginson wrote history, biography, fiction, literary criticism, and reminiscences, including his celebrated (Boston, 1870), and served a term in the Massachusetts legislature. Tilden G. Edelstein, (New Haven, Conn., 1968); James W. Tuttleton, (Boston, 1978); , 3:199; , 1:394; , 4:16–18.

Respectfully yours,

FREDERICK DOUGLASS.

PLSr: ., 26 October 1860.