of any : to whom we could direct our box when ready. Of course it 1s desireable to have a . I am sorry that I did not write to you about it a fortnight ago, as soon as we decided to get up the box; I certainly should have done so, but was under the impression that Mrs Crofts could give us the information we needed—she however refers me to you.—I fear we shall not now send the things in time for the poor people to benefit by them during the cold of this winter, however it is too late to think of this now.—I have no doubt that our things will be ready before we hear from you—but we must keep them till I get your answer, & the proper address. I have been writing to some Birkenhead friend’s who hope to get a free passage for our box, & I hope we may get it over free of duty—but we do not know whether we shall Succeed in either of these points.

Our Society has had a valuable addition this last year in Mrs John Smithson⁷Sarah Ann Morris Smithson (1826—?) was the daughter of Alexander Morris, a Quaker from Manchester, England, who had been an early supporter of Frederick Douglass’s efforts to establish his first newspaper. In 1859 she married John Smithson (1824-1903), a cotton manufacturer and fellow Quaker. , 5:108 (April 1847), 17:192 (July 1859); 1881 England Census, Chorley, Cheshire, 26; George R. Smithson, (London, 1906), 15-16.—your old friend Miss Morris of Manchester. Both she & her husband are pleasant people—we have not seen very much of them, as Mr. Smithson has been a good deal from home & out of health.— She has just left Halifax for some Months, but when she returns I hope we may be nearer neighbours than we have been, & see more of each other. They are giving up a good & very prettily situated house in which they have been living, because it is rather too far from the town, and Mrs Smithson has felt too much isolated from her family & friends. They are thinking I fancy of taking one in the neighbourhood of the Parks, I hope they may do so. You know of course that destiny in the shape of the Methodist Conference—is sending Dr. Crofts & his family to Hanley⁸Located in the county of Stafford, famous as a center of ceramics production since medieval times, the Hanley district was known, from as early as the seventeenth century, for its production of pottery: its jugs and vases were renowned in the eighteenth century, and its earthenware in the nineteenth. Today Hanley is recognized as one of the six historic “pottery towns” of Staffordshire, all of which were incorporated into the modern town of Stoke-on-Trent. Frederick Litchfield, (London, 1900), 164; Howard Coutts, (New Haven, Conn., 2001), 155. in the Pottery district— I shall be very sorry to lose Mrs C. from this neighbourhood—tho’ I quite hope we shall see her more sometimes, for she is attached to Halifax, & has many friends here. A lecture was given in Halifax last week by Mr Spence,⁹A wealthy Liverpool tin merchant and cotton broker, James Spence (d. 1893) was a major figure in Britain’s pro-Confederate movement and the leader of Britain’s Southern lobby. In the fall of 1861, he published The American Union, considered by some scholars to be the most sustained and coherent argument for Southern independence published at the time. Quite popular in Great Britain, the book went through four editions in as many months. It was translated into French, German, Italian, and Spanish. Spence was instrumental in the founding of the Liverpool Southern Club, the first organization in Great Britain to promote the interests of the Confederacy, and by 1863 he was at the center of almost all similar groups. Serving as a paid consultant to the Confederate government from October 1862 to December 1863, he was intimately involved in efforts to raise money for the Confederacy through the sale of bonds in the financial markets in both Great Britain and Europe. Spence organized dozens of public meetings in support of the South, most notably during the weeks leading up to the submission of motions in both houses of Parliament calling for recognition of the Confederacy in 1863. He published forty-five influential articles in the London between February 1862 and January 1865, making the case for the Confederacy’s right to exist. Following the end of the Civil War, Spence remained in business in Liverpool until 1871, when he moved to London. By 1890, he was operating a tinplate works in South Wales. He later retired to London, where he died in 1893. John D. Bennett, (Jefferson, N.C., 2008), 59, 157; R. J. M. Blackett, “Pressure from Without: African Americans, British Public Opinion, and Civil War Diplomacy," in , ed. Robert E. May (West Lafayette, Ind., 1995), 77; idem, “British Views of the Confederacy,” in , ed. Joseph P. Wood (Jackson, Miss., 2003), 141-43. whose name you perhaps know,— he is a friend to the South—tho’ he is of course professing to be as much opposed to slavery as any one;— he is a good speaker & very plausible in his arguments but, tho’ Mr Ackroyd¹⁰Probably the Halifax native Edward Akroyd (1810-87), a wealthy industrialist, politician, and philanthropist. In 1847, /Akroyd and his brother Henry inherited a fortune of £300,000 and one of the most successful textile firms in Great Britain. He was first elected to Parliament (as a Whig) in 1857. Following a narrow defeat in 1859, Akroyd was reelected in 1865 and retained his seat until his retirement in 1876. During the Civil War, he was a member of the pro-Confederate Southern Independence Association. In Halifax, Akroyd was well known for devoting much of his wealth and time to local social and religious causes. He was particularly interested in developing model industrial communities as well as in supporting schools, evening classes for women, and a workingmen’s college. Akroyd contributed to horticultural, literary, and scientific societies, as well as a recreation club, a clothing club, a mutual improvement society, and the Penny Savings movement. Blackett,, 67-68; (online). & other locally influential people gave all their influences to the meeting, there was a good deal of opposition &
dissatisfaction shown by the audience.—Both the Hx newspapers, I am
sorry to say, side with the South,¹¹Although Halifax, in Yorkshire, was generally recognized as a pro-Union community with a well-established history of antislavery activity, the two leading local newspapers, the Guardian and the Courier, maintained a more neutral position in their responses to the Civil War. While neither newspaper was overtly pro-South in its views, over the course of the war both papers published articles and editorials that could be seen as favoring first one side and then the other. Their calculated middle-of-the-road approach might easily have been construed as pro-Confederate by committed antislavery advocates such as the Reverend Russell Lant Carpenter and his wife, Mary Browne Carpenter. Blackett, , 20, 22, 24, 29, 35, 163-64, 201, 214-15. but the Halifax people are quite with the North—there are two lectures arranged for next week by a Mr Mason Jones¹²An Irish native of Shropshire, England, Thomas Mason Jones (1833-73) was a well-known orator who lectured on a variety of literary and political topics in Great Britain and the United States in the 1860s. In 1865 and again in 1868, he ran unsuccessfully for a seat in Parliament as a representative of the radical wing of the Liberal party. He was the author of a three-volume novel, , which was published in 1867. Jones died at his home in the Kensington neighborhood of London in 1873 after a lengthy period of “nervous depression” brought on in part by accusations of corruption that emerged following his failed 1868 campaign for Parliament in the borough of Boston. New York , 20, 25 November 1862; Bury Saint Edmund (Eng.) , 23 December 1873; (London, 1876), vii-viii, 8, 28, 74-76, 102, 184, 192, 200, 244, 256, 264; T. W. Whitley, (Coventry, Eng., 1894), 347-50.—a popular orator & friend of the North. My husband¹³Russell Lant Carpenter. is to