Leeds[, Eng.] 5 Dec[ember] [18]62[.]

My DEAR FRIEND/

I am compelled to send messages from Montrose & Kelso, about the papers for those two [illegible], as the addresses are to be changed and I hasten to congratulate you on the “address” you have sent to “Great Britain”¹, 5:722–23 (October 1862).—This address, (which you thought you sent over by the same steamer that brought your last long and interesting letter to me,)²This letter from Douglass to Crofts has not been located. must have landed some days sooner; but as I had heard nothing about it until your letter came, (last Saturday, Nov 20th.) I wrote off at once to Mr. H. Richardson³Henry Richardson. to enquire. By return post came a “London Daily News,” with it in full & a nice, long letter from him—full of Anti-Slavery interest;⁴Crofts is referring to a letter she recieved from Henry Richardson in which he enclosed a copy of the issue of the that included Douglass’s “Slave’s Appeal to Great Britain.” London , 26 November 1862. no message, from his wife or mention of her!⁵Ellen Richardson.——He hoped it might have been published in “the Mercury”⁶Probably the Leeds Mercury. & ——& would have been had I had it sooner—As it is an “” from it was given on Saturday—& Mr Frederick Baines,⁷The sons of Edward Baines, a nonconformist Liberal party Member of Parliament from Leeds, England, Frederick Baines (1812–?) and his brother Edward Baines, Jr., inherited management of the Leeds from their father. Never healthy, Frederick generally managed the business end of the operation. Edward Baines, Jr., , 2d ed. (London, 1859), 40–42, 70, 265–66, 284, 294–95; Ann Scott, Mervyn Eadies, and Andrew Lees, (Oxford, Eng., 2012), 78–79. (whom I saw at his office this morning,) said, it was —after the Extract from the Address was given, they could not publish it whole. I mailed you, this day, from their office, the “Mercury’s”—Containing that & the long & interesting extract from your last letter to me that you thought might be published with advantage—Mr E. Baines published it at once, in reply to my note.—& to day I up & all I could get—also the Extract from your address—I trust will do —The address, (so far as your friend Julia can judge,) be better—& covers ground——

Now, a word, my dear friend, about your personal matters—& prithie,
to what I say—Even if all goes as you wish it on the 1st January 63. ⁸Crofts must be responding to information contained in a private letter from Douglass that is now lost. Douglass made no allusion to abandoning his editorial post for a farming scheme in any issue of or in public addresses in the fall of 1862.—this is the 15th year of its existence in some shape! & tho’ the name has vari[e]d, the Editor has always being & the man—, more known than ever—The paper was started from this side the water; & the ground of ibtaining material aid for your branch of the cause, is the paper—Truly, the more free colored people are in the North the more they will need a paper—to assist in elevating them & educating them;—No, my dear friend, do not be led astray, or make a mistake by hastily giving up the paper!—I feel quite afraid of this farming scheme; nothing about farming yourself—and would be like a fish out of water⁹The expression “fish out of water” may originate in the “Prologue” of Geoffrey Chaucer’s , in which he likens a monk with no cloister to a fish that is waterless. Geoffrey Chaucer, , ed. Paul G. Ruggiers (Norman, Okla., 1979), 10. without —& public work! I wish I could fly over the water & have a consultation with you—I have felt quite uneasy in my mind since this farm business was first mentioned—& do not believe in it, , pleasant & lucrative as it may be to people differently situated—while you keep at your work, & by sending your paper over let the British people know you are at work for your people you need not fear supplies failing!— is your means of Communication with the many friends in Great Britain to whom you have not time to write, & who will be more interested than ever since your address is in circulation—Bear all this mind, my friend, I pray you—I hope to send remittances to you in one or two weeks according to how people send in—& I have no doubt but that Mrs Carpenter^10*Mary Browne Carpenter. is sending today—

I feel sorry the Rochester Society have not sent a colored teacher to
a colored school!!¹¹Julia Griffiths Crofts probably alludes to the freedmen’s aid activities of the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society in Virginia. The group dispatched the white Quaker teacher Julia Wilbur to Alexandria, Virginia, in October 1862. Later, the former slave Harriet Jacobs, author of a famous autobiography, joined Wilbur in her educational work with Virginia freedmen. , 5:773–74 (January 1863), 5:804 (March 1863); Jean Fagan Yellin, (New York, 2004), 164–68. It is seven years last June since I saw RosettaSprague, 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. —& in that time she will be much changed, & much improved, without doubt—I wish the Com: had seen fit to appoint her, as she likes teaching, but I hope she will do as well in New Jersey as she would have done in Washington!¹²Although it is possible that Rosetta Douglass applied for a teaching position at Myrtilla Miner’s school, no record of that has been found. Instead, Julia Griffiths Crofts seems to be referring to the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society’s decision to send a representative to Washington, D.C., to work as a teacher with contrabands. She indicates that Rosetta Douglass had been turned down for the position by the “Commissaries for the Contrabands.” Instead, Julia Wilbur received the appointment and was sent from Rochester. Hewitt, , 193; McFeely, , 220.My love &a best wishes for her & Lewis¹³ Lewis H. Douglass. too, as well as the boys at home & Mrs D.—Christmas is almost here—a dismal season both here & in the States, this time. Unprecedented sums are being raised for the “Lancashire distress’’¹⁴The “distress” in Lancashire was the result of the “cotton famine” experienced by British mills because of the naval blockade of Southern ports after New Orleans fell to Union forces in April 1862. By the 1850s, Lancashire, the center of Great Britain’s textile industry, was importing 80 percent of its cotton from the South. A bumper cotton crop in 1860 and an incomplete blockade allowed British mills to operate fairly normally in the early months of the Civil War. By November 1861, however, there were 100,000 unemployed textile workers in Lancashire. After the fall of New Orleans, the situation rapidly worsened, and in November 1862 the number of out-of-work textile workers in Lancashire rose to almost 250,000; over 450,000 people in the area were on some sort of public relief. Indeed, at the lowest point of the cotton famine, one-fifth of Lancashire’s population was on a combination of public and private relief. British manufacturers were eventually able to begin replacing the blockaded American cotton with cotton imported from India and Egypt, and by the mid-1860s the crisis had begun to abate. , 2 November 1861; John Watts, (London, 1866), 227–28, 283–84; D. A. Farnie, “The Cotton Famine in Great Britain,” in , ed. Barrie M. Ratcliffe (Manchester, Eng., 1975), 160–61; Sylvia Ellis, (Lanham, Md., 2009), 36.—our hall is full of clothing for them

I must close—all join in kind love to you—Ever your true & faithful
friend,

JULIA G. CROFTSCrofts, Julia Griffiths

A native of London, Julia Griffiths (1811–95) was the oldest of seven children born to Thomas Griffiths, a onetime stationer turned publisher and bookseller, and his wife Charlotte Powis. She first met Douglass during the latter half of 1846 when he lectured in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where she was visiting with friends. Her mother had been a friend of William Wilberforce, who had advocated for the abolition of slavery in England, and she herself was active in the British antislavery movement. Charmed by the American, Griffiths followed Douglass back to the United States with her younger sister, Eliza, in 1848. In 1850, Eliza married John Dick, one of Douglass’s printers for the North Star, and the couple moved to Toronto. Julia became a constant companion and partner to Douglass and a leading antislavery organizer in Rochester for the next five years. She contributed to the North Star as copy editor and journalist, and saved the paper from financial ruin by organizing its books and by aggressively pursuing subscribers and donations. She helped found the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society, acting as its secretary, and organized the Rochester Anti-Slavery Fair. Initially, she lived with the Douglass family, which led to tension in the household and to unsubstantiated rumors that Douglass and Griffiths shared more than a business relationship. In 1853, the vicious attacks upon her in abolitionist newspapers drove her from the Douglass home and finally forced her to return to England in 1855, ostensibly to raise funds for the North Star. In 1859 she married a Methodist minister from Halifax, Henry O. Crofts (1814–80), who acted as an agent for Frederick Douglass’ Paper. Through the Civil War, she continued to organize and revitalize ladies’ antislavery societies and to lecture against slavery. After the war and her husband’s death, she ran a boarding school and worked as a governess. Her friendship with Douglass continued in frequent correspondence, and she welcomed him and his second wife, Helen Pitts Douglass, when they visited England in 1886. British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Reporter, new ser., 5:82 (1 April 1857); 1871 England Census, Durham County, Gateshead, 41; London, England: Baptisms, Marriages and Burials, 1538–1812, Ancestry.com; Maria Diedrich, Love Across Color Lines: Ottilie Assing and Frederick Douglass (New York, 1999), 179–84; Waldo E. Martin, Jr., The Mind of Frederick Douglass (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1984), 40–41; Janet Douglas, “A Cherished Friendship: Julia Griffiths Crofts and Frederick Douglass,” Slavery and Abolition, 33:265–74 (June 2012); Erwin Palmer, “A Partnership in the Abolition Movement,” University of Rochester Library Bulletin, 26:1–17 (Autumn/Winter 1970–71). .

ALS: General Correspondence File, reel 1, frames 761–64, FD Papers, DLC.