Rochester[, N.Y.] 7 Dec[ember] 1859.

MY DEAR FATHER

I am proceeding in my german very well for my teacher says so.¹Annie Douglass attended Public School 13 in Rochester from 1857 until her death in 1859. Initially known as the Munger School, it opened in 1842 and operated out of rented rooms on South St. Paul Street. The school moved once its first building was erected in 1843. Two years later, it was remodeled, enlarged, and renamed in honor of Horace Mann. The school was known locally as the “German school” because so many of its students were drawn from Rochester’s German immigrant community. George W. Elliott, ed., (Rochester, 1887), 93; William F. Peck, Rochester’s South Wedge (Chicago, 2005), 63. I am in
the first reader and I can read. I expect that you will have a german letter
from me in a very Short time. I have learned another piece: and it is an
Anti Slavery I am going to speak it in school. my piece is this.

O he is not the man for me
Who buys or Sells a slave
Nor he who will not set him free
But send him to his grave
But he whose noble heart beats warm
For all men’s llife and liberty
Who loves alike each human form
O that’s the man for me

It is in the Garland of Freedom²The lines are taken from a poem called “The Man for Me.” Penned by an unknown author, the poem first appeared in William Wells Brown’s collection of antislavery songs, The Anti-Slavery Harp (1848), where it was set to the tune of the hymn “The Rose that all are Praising.” In 1853 it was included in the second volume of Wilson Armistead’s The Garland of Freedom. William Wells Brown, comp., (Boston, 1848), 33-34; Wilson Armistead, comp., , 3 vols. (London, 1853), 2:27-28. and fer four verses of it. My letter will not
be very long. Poor Mr. Brown is dead. That hard hearted man said he must
die, and they took him in and open field and about a half mile from the Jail
and hung him.³Annie is commenting on the death of John Brown, who was hanged two days earlier, on 2 December 1859, in Charlestown, Virginia. The “hard hearted man” is probably a reference to the governor of Virginia, Henry A. Wise, who had ordered her father’s arrest (thus starting the chain of events that had led to Douglass’s flight to England) and refused to stay Brown’s execution. Oates, , 314, 334-35, 349-51. The german children like me very much but I have gone a
head of them and they have been there longer than me too.
They all send their love.
From your affectionate Daughter

ANNIE DOUGLASS.

[P.S.] [illegible illegible illegible illegible]

ALS: General Correspondence File, reel 32, frames 5-6, FD Papers, DLC.