Brooklyn, N.Y. 19 Dec[ember] 1856[.]

TO FREDERICK DOUGLASS

MY DEAR SIR,

I thank you, and your daughterSprague, 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. ¹Rosetta (1839-1906), the first child of Frederick and Anna Douglass, was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, on 24 June 1839. As a child, she wrote and read letters for her mother, whom she assisted with housework and piece work for the shoe factories in Lynn, Massachusetts. At age seven, she was sent to school 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 her. 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, which was one of the first institutions of higher education to accept both African Americans and women. She taught in Philadelphia and Salem, New Jersey, until her marriage in 1863 to Nathan Sprague, with whom she had six children. Before her death, she wrote a memoir of her mother, which remains one of the most complete documents of Anna Murray Douglass’s life. Sprague, ; Sterling, , 132-45; Ellen N. Lawson and Marlene Merrill, “The Antebellum ‘Talented Thousandth’: Black College Students at Oberlin before the Civil War,” , 52:145 (Spring 1983); Miriam DeCosta-Willis, “Smoothing the Tucks in Father’s Linen: The Women of Cedar Hill,” , 4:30-33 (Fall 1987); Render, “Afro-American Women,” 307-10.> also, for the copy of your letter to Mrs Sturge.²Probably either Mrs. Hannah Dickinson Sturge (1816-96), second wife of the wealthy Quaker Philanthropist Joseph Sturge (1793-1859), or her sister-in-law Mrs. Lydia Albright Sturge (1807-92), wife of Edmund Sturge (1808-93). Both women, lifelong Quakers, were active in abolitionist circles in Birmingham, England. In addition to being a member of the Birmingham Ladies’ Negro’s Friend Society, Hannah Sturge was involved with the Ladies’ Temperance Movement, the antislavery Free Produce Committee, and the Infirm and Aged Women’s Society. Lydia Sturge, who served as secretary of the Birmingham Ladies’ Negro’s Friend Society for many years, was also involved with the Ladies’ Temperance Movement, the Aborigines Protection Society, and the Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade. Both women hosted Frederick Douglass while he was in England in the 1840s. Lewis Tappan included several members of the Sturge family among his correspondents. (London, 1893), 155-68; , ser. 2, 2:383-84; Bertram Wyatt-Brown, (Baton Rouge, La., 1985), 94-96; Alex Tyrrell, Joseph Sturge and the Moral Radical Party in Early Victorian Britain (London, 1987), 152, 195, 200; Claire Midgley, (1992; New York, 1995), 174, 187-88. It is an ingenious defence, full as much so as was Mr Burlingame’s³Tappan is referring to a duel between Congressmen Preston Smith Brooks, a Democrat of South Carolina, and Anson Burlingame, a Republican of Massachusetts, which reportedly took place in July 1856. Brooks challenged Burlingame to a duel in response to Burlingame’s June speech in the House of Representatives denouncing Brooks’s near-fatal beating of Senator Charles Sumner in May. Choosing rifles, Burlingame accepted the challenge and proposed that the duel take place on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. After initially accepting those terms, Brooks withdrew from the duel, claiming that he feared he would be assassinated if he traveled north to reach the proposed site. Burlingame emerged from the affair with his reputation much enhanced, while Brooks was labeled a coward in Northern newspapers. A native of New Berlin, New York, Anson Burlingame (1820-70) spent his childhood in Ohio and Michigan. In 1846 he graduated from Harvard Law School and went into private practice in Boston. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, Burlingame became active in the antislavery movement and swiftly earned a national reputation for his skills as an orator. After serving in the Massachusetts legislature, he was elected to Congress as a Know-Nothing in 1855. Soon afterward, he helped organize the Republican party in Massachusetts. He lost his bid for a fourth term in Congress in 1860, possibly because he devoted most of his time to campaigning for Abraham Lincoln in the Midwest while neglecting his own campaign back in Massachusetts. Burlingame was rewarded by the Lincoln administration with an appointment as U.S. minister to Austria in March 1861. After the Austrian government objected to his appointment, because of his views on Hungarian independence, Burlingame was appointed minister to China. He filled that post until 1867, when he resigned to accept a commission as China’s first official envoy to the West. As envoy, he was specifically charged with negotiating treaties with foreign powers. In 1868 he negotiated the Burlingame Treaty between the United States and China, which granted reciprocal privileges to both nations. At the time of his death, in 1870, he was negotiating a treaty with Russia. David L. Anderson, “Anson Burlingame: Reformer and Diplomat,”, 25:293-308 (December 1979); , 3:289-90; , 3:965-66. with regard to Mr Brooks.⁴Preston Smith Brooks (1819-57) was born in Edgefield County, South Carolina. A member of one of the most prominent slaveholding families in South Carolina’s Upcountry, Brooks was privately educated. In 1839 he was expelled from the College of South Carolina for unruly behavior and did not receive a degree. After being wounded in a duel with Louis Wigfall in 1840, Brooks was forced to walk with a cane for the rest of his life. In 1844 he was elected to a single term in the South Carolina House of Representatives. He was admitted to the bar in 1846 and went into private practice in Edgefield County until 1853, when he was elected to Congress as a Democrat. While serving his second term in Congress, he assaulted Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner with his cane on the floor of the Senate on 22 May 1856 in response to Sumner’s “The Crime against Kansas” oration, which he had delivered two days earlier. The speech included a personal attack on Brooks’s cousin Senator Andrew P. Butler, who had not been present at the time and was therefore unable to defend himself. Although Sumner barely survived the caning, members of the House of Representatives were unable to muster the two-thirds majority required to expel a sitting member of Congress. Nonetheless, Brooks resigned his seat in July 1856. Viewed as a hero in his home state, he was promptly elected to fill the vacancy created by his own resignation. Brooks remained a member of Congress until his death in January 1857. Donald, , 282-97; David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler, eds., , 5 vols. (Santa Barbara, Calif., 2000), 1:288-89; DAB, 3:88; , 3:625-26. Killing wicked men is merely destroying their visible presence among men. They still live. God has put them in this world & we have no right to send them out of it unbidden of God. I repeat, “Vengeance is mine”.⁵Rom. 12:9. The slaves hear a great deal of what is said & printed at the North. What is the cause of the late insurrection.

Yes, I have read your paper of the 12th very thoroughly & so has my wife.⁶Sarah Jackson Tappan. Your appeal is very able. But I am in doubt. In your speeches & in your paper you advocate the slaughter of slaveholders. I cannot go with you. How then can I take pains to sustain your paper? Say you, Must I cease to be independent? Must I smother my convictions to please my patrons? I answer, By no means. But while you act independently so must I. How can I encourage the wider circulation of a paper, able as it is, deserving in most respects as is the editor, when I believe he is scattering “firebrands, arrows, and death.’’⁷Prov. 26:18. There are so many things in you, my dear friend, that claim my esteem & inspire my confidence that I regret—deeply—that I am unable to go with you in all your sentiments & purposes. I have never been called a coward & I am naturally very sensitive to aggressions; but since I cordially embraced the religion of the Prince of Peace I have believed fully that the belligerent spirit of the world is totally adverse to this princaples. Besides, I think it the most unwise & inexpedient of all conduct. What I should do if attacked or saw a friend attacked I can’t say. Instincts are often stronger than arguments or principles. But it

is my deliberate judgment that the whole policy of private & public warfare is bad—I may say wicked—and of the devil.

If you will inform me thru your columns how a friend who loves you can extend the circulation of what is consonant to his tastes & principles in your able paper without extending the circulation of what he deems wrong & of evil tendency I shall be glad to read what you write. I call myself a constant reader of your paper, tho’ occasionally a number is laid aside, in the hum of business, but [illegible] [illegible].

Truly & affecy yours’

L. TAPPAN.

[P.S.] The 20 days allowed by the law for the discharge of a cargo⁸Tappan’s reference is to demurrage. Demurrage is a charge to the owner of any material that is not unloaded from a ship or a container before the end of a contract. The charge covers the potential lost revenue if the ship is forced to remain in port. Henry Campbell Black, (St. Paul, Minn., 1910), 352, 439.—“working days”—will expire on the 22d. Probably the boxes for you were at the bottom of the [illegible]. Yesterday I found an inquiry that they were not out of the vessel. I regret this delay. Please remember me to Mrs DouglassDouglass, Anna Murray

Anna Murray Douglass (c. 1813-82), Douglass’s first wife, was born free in Denton, Maryland. She was the eighth child of Bambarra and Mary Murray, slaves who had been manumitted shortly before her birth. At seventeen she moved to Baltimore, where she worked as a domestic and met Douglass at meetings of the East Baltimore Mental Improvement Society. In 1838, Murray helped Douglass finance his escape, and she joined him in New York City, where they were married on 15 September 1838. During Douglass’s first tour of the British Isles (1845-47), she remained in Lynn, Massachusetts, where she supported the family by binding shoes. She gained a reputation for frugality and skillful household management, qualities that would contribute greatly to her family’s financial prosperity over the years. A member of the Lynn Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society and a regular participant in the annual antislavery bazaars in Boston, she continued her antislavery activities after moving to Rochester in 1847. Unlettered, reserved, and, according to her husband, never completely at ease in white company, she seldom appeared at public functions with Douglass. She was nevertheless affectionately remembered by her husband’s associates as a “warm” and “hospitable” hostess at their home. On 9 July 1882, Anna Douglass suffered an attack of paralysis in Washington, D.C., and died there on 4 August. Lib., 18 November, 2 December 1853; Philadelphia Christian Recorder, 20 July 1882; Washington (D.C.) Post, 5 August 1882; Rosetta Douglass Sprague, My Mother as I Recall Her: A Paper Delivered before the Anna Murray Douglass Union, W.C.T.U., May 10, 1900 (1900; Washington, D.C., 1923); Jane Marsh Parker, “Reminiscences of Frederick Douglass,” Outlook, 51:552-53 (6 April 1895); Dorothy Sterling, ed., We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1984), 132-37; Julie R. Nelson, “The Best of Intentions: Anna Murray Douglass, Helen Pitts Douglass, and the Challenge of Social Equality,’ Proteus: A Journal of Ideas, 12:39-42 (Spring 1995); Sylvia Lyons Render, “Afro-American Women: The Outstanding and the Obscure,” Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress, 32:306-10 (October 1975). ,⁹Anna Murray Douglass. & to your daughter. She writes a good hand, & is a very correct copyist.

ALS: Douglass Papers, General Correspondence File, reel 1, frames 659-60, DLC.