ROSETTA DOUGLASS SPRAGUE TO FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Rochester[, N.Y.] 21 Feb[ruar]y [18]65.

MY DEAR FATHER

Yours dated Feb. 18th Phila.¹Douglass lectured in Philadelphia on 16 February 1865 and on the next night in nearby Wilmington, Delaware. On 21 February, he spoke in Baltimore. No letter from him to his daughter from this period has survived. , ser. 1, 4:xx. reached me last night it found us all well and LewisDouglass, Lewis Henry

Lewis Henry Douglass (1840-1908), the second child and eldest son of Frederick and Anna Murray Douglass, was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Educated in the schools of Rochester, New York, he learned the printer's trade as a boy working in the North Star office. In 1863 he enlisted in the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry, serving as the regiment's sergeant major and seeing action at the Battle of Fort Wagner, South Carolina, in July I863. Disabled, he was discharged in 1864. He was a member, along with his father, of the black delegation that interviewed President Andrew Johnson on 7 February 1866. Later that year, after failing to obtain employment as a printer in Rochester because of racial discrimination, he moved to Colorado. There he briefly worked for the Denver Daily Gazette until refused membership in the local printers' union because he was “a colored man." In 1869 he took employment as a compositor at the Government Printing Office in Washington, D.C. When he attempted to join the Columbia Typographical Union, No. 100, a controlling minority of the membership blocked his election at their May 1869 meeting. For the record, the opposition was based not on his color but on reports that Douglass had “ratted” (worked as a nonunion printer for below-scale wages) in Denver. Dougla,s. who remained at the Printing Office throughout his widely publicized effort to break the union's color barrier, denied the allegation but to no avail. The factionalized union continued to table his application along with those of other black printers (including Frederick Douglass, Jr.) as late as 1871. By then Lewis and Frederick, Jr., had become publishers of the Washington New [National] Era, of which their father was the editor. In 1872-73 Lewis Douglass served on the Legislative Council of the District of Columbia. By the 1890s he was a successful realtor in his adopted city. On 7 October 1869 he married Helen Amelia Loguen, daughter of Reverend Jermain W. Loguen. Lewis H. Douglass to Frederick Douglass, 29 October 1866, General Correspondence File, reel 2, frames 220-22, FD Papers, DLC; Lewis H. Douglass to D. W. Flynn, 24 May 1869, in San Francisco Elevator, 11 June 1869; NASS, 22 May 1869; Rochester Union and Advertiser, 6 August 1869; William H. Boyd, comp., Boyd’s Directory of the District of Columbia, . . . 1873 (Washington, D.C. 1873), 525; Boyd's Directory, 1893, 371; James M. Gregory, Frederick Douglass, the Orator (1893; New York, 1971), 102-03; Foner and Lewis, Black Worker, 1: 370, 374-83. ²Lewis H. Douglass. at home, he still has his sick times though not as violent as in the early part of winter. I have heard from NathanSprague, Nathan

³Nathan Sprague. he is at Hilton Head, he writes that after having been placed in the regiment he was changed to the 21st South Carolina regiment⁴The Twenty-first Regiment of South Carolina Colored Infantry was organized in March 1864 by consolidating the Third, Fourth, and Fifth South Carolina U.S. Colored Regiments, which were understaffed. It was attached to the Third Brigade of Vogdes’ Division, District of Florida, Department of the South, in April 1864. In October the regiment was deployed to Morris Island, South Carolina. From February through August 1865, the Twenty-first served as part of the garrison of Charleston, South Carolina. After being moved from Charleston, the regiment was stationed at a number of posts across South Carolina and Georgia until being mustered out in October 1866. Walter B. Edgar, (Columbia, S.C., 1998), 373-74; Dyer, , 1:1727; Westwood, , 138. but on refusing to do duty in that regiment he was sent back to the 54th and now they tell him they (they meaning the officers) will send him to the 55th⁵ The Fifty-fifth Massachusetts Infantry Regiment. doing duty at Savannah and Nathan says he will go there willingly I am waiting anxiously to hear from him and to know really where he is. FredDouglass, Frederick Jr. (Douglass's son)

Frederick Douglass, Jr. (1842-92), was born in Lynn, Massachusetts, the second son of Frederick and Anna Murray Douglass. Throughout his adult life Frederick, Jr., struggled to achieve success within the same industries as his famous father. For years he tried unsuccessfully to obtain membership in the typographical union; he did, however, work with several newspapers, including the New National Era. He was also a frequent contributor to other newspapers, such as the Detroit Plaindealer, the New York Times, and Baltimore's National Leader, where he worked at the time of his death. He was the only of Douglass's sons not to enlist in the Union army. Henry O. Waggoner, a close friend of his father's, took Frederick, Jr., and his brother Lewis to Denver in 1866, to help them establish their careers. Ultimately their attempts failed, and the two returned east. During an outbreak of influenza in 1890, his wife, Virginia, died. His own son, Frederick Douglass III, as well as several other of the couple's children died at an early age. Frederick, Jr., succumbed to a prolonged and painful illness in July 1892. New York Times, 24 September 1876; Washington (D.C.) Bee, 30 July 1892; Detroit Plaindealer, 12 August 1892; McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 97, 145, 248-49, 258, 272, 342, 365. . has also sent two more letters to you⁶These two letters from Frederick Douglass, Jr., to his father have not survived. he says he is well and doing well, having just at the moment comparatively nothing to do but his pay is; running on. There are no more letters of importance arrived Since I wrote to you last.

We live very quietly no one coming and with the exception of my going to the office for the mail no one going any where. I have been so housed all winter I am glad of the chance to go to the office and Hannah says it makes her ache to walk so much so that I go with pleasure, motherDouglass, 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). takes charge of little AnnieSprague, Annie Rosine

.⁷Annie Rosine Sprague (1864-93) was the eldest of Nathan and Rosetta Douglass Sprague’s six children and the first grandchild of Frederick and Anna Murray Douglass. Born in November 1864 in Rochester, New York, eleven months after her parents’ marriage, she was named after the Douglass’s youngest child, Annie, who died in 1859. Annie Sprague spent most of her childhood living in her maternal grandparents’ homes in Rochester and Washington, D.C. After Anna Murray Douglass’s death in 1882, Annie Sprague assisted her aunt, Louisa Sprague, in managing her grandfather’s home at Cedar Hill. On 6 April 1893 in Washington, D.C., she married her grandfather’s former secretary, Charles Satchell Morris (1865-1931). After her marriage, she joined her husband in Ann Arbor, where he was a law student at the University of Michigan, but in November, Annie, who was pregnant, fell ill and died. 1870 U.S. Census, New York, Monroe County, 70; 1880 U.S. Census, District of Columbia, Washington, 143; Herbert Shapiro, (Amherst, Mass., 1988), 483; Genna Rae McNeil et al., (Grand Rapids, Mich., 2013), 61-68; McFeely, , 222, 248, 312-13, 372-73; District of Columbia Marriages, 1830-1921 (online). She grows more and more playful each day she lives. Mother⁸Anna Murray Douglass. sends love also Lewis and baby would send hers if she could speak. I am happy to know that you had such a pleasant time in Phila.⁹For most of the latter half of February 1865, Douglass’s itinerary was filled with speaking engagements. On 16 February he spoke at Concert Hall in Philadelphia at a meeting of the Social, Civil and Statistical Association of the Colored People of Pennsylvania. The following day he spoke in Wilmington, Delaware, and on the 22nd he was in Baltimore, Maryland. Apparently, his son Charles (who had been discharged from the army in 1864) accompanied him on this speaking tour. , ser. 1, 4:xx; , 2:407. Give my love to Charley¹⁰Charles R. Douglass. I intend writing him Soon.

Affectionately Your Daughter

ROSA D SPRAGUESprague, 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. .

[P.S.] Please give my love to Mrs Gordon and Mary,¹¹Probably Sarah Gordon (c. 1813-98) and Mary A. Jones (c. 1838-?). The wife of Henry Gordon, a wealthy and successful mixed-race Philadelphia caterer, and a schoolteacher in her own right, Sarah Gordon ran a private school that attracted students from Philadelphia’s elite black families. Mary A. Jones, who may have been related to Mrs. Gordon, resided (along with her husband, John W. Jones) with the Gordon family for many years and served as their housekeeper. 1860 U.S. Census, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia County, 88; 1870 U.S. Census, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia County, 156-57; 1880 U.S. Census, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia County, 421; (online); Monroe N. Work, ed., (Tuskegee, Ala., 1922), 247; Marilyn Ogilvie and Joy Harvey, eds., , 2 vols. (New York, 2000), 1:65. if you see them.

ALS: General Correspondence File, reel 2, frames 92-93, FD Papers, DLC.