Rochester[, N.Y.] 2 Feb[ruary] [18]59[.]

MY DEAR FATHER,

Lewis¹Lewis Henry Douglass (1840-1908) was the oldest of Frederick and Anna Murray Douglass’s three sons. Born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, Lewis attended school in Rochester. He also worked in his father’s newspaper office, where he learned the printer’s trade. During the Civil War, Lewis enlisted in the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry and rose to the rank of sergeant major. After the war, he spent several years working in Denver, Colorado, as a secretary for the Red, White, and Blue Mining Company. While there he also learned typography. In 1869 he moved to Washington, D.C., where he found employment at the Government Printing Office, largely through his father’s connections. That same year, he married Helen Amelia Loguen, daughter of Jermain Wesley Loguen. In 1873 he joined his father’s staff at the and was placed in charge of the paper’s editorials. During the administration of Ulysses S. Grant, Lewis served for two years as a member of the council of legislation for the District of Columbia and for another two years as a special agent for the post office. During the Rutherford B. Hayes administration, he served under his father as an assistant marshal for the District of Columbia. Upon leaving that post, he pursued a career in the real estate business. , ser. 2, 3:860; , ser. 3, 1:126; McFeely, , 248, 271-72; , 1:423-25. handed me your letter last evening, I was glad to hear from you it reached me just as I was going to hear Miss Gray the Dramatic reader.²Rosetta Douglass possibly refers to a performer from England known as Miss Grey. One of the principal forms of entertainment in the nineteenth century was the “dramatic reading.” Dramatic readers, usually women, stood before an audience and recited famous literature while acting out scenes. Dramatic reading was popular on both sides of the Atlantic, and several readers from England toured the United States. A Miss Grey gave readings of Shakespearean works several times in London, including , to wide acclaim. London > 18 February 1854; Belfast , 9 December 1864. Charley³Charles Remond Douglass (1844-1920), who was named after the abolitionist Charles Remond, was the youngest of Frederick and Anna Murray Douglass’s sons. He was born in Lynn, Massachusetts, and like his brothers, was educated in Rochester and trained by his father in the newspaper office. Like Lewis H. Douglass, Charles enlisted in the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry during the Civil War, but mainly served with the Fifth Massachusetts Cavalry Regiment, where he was promoted to the rank of first sergeant. After the war, Charles settled in Washington, D.C., and found employment as a clerk in the Freedman’s Bureau (1867-69) and later in the Treasury Department (1869-75). After his father purchased the in 1870, Charles acted as a correspondent for the newspaper. In 1871 he served as a clerk to the Santo Domingo Commission, and President Ulysses S. Grant later appointed him consul to Puerto Plata, Santo Domingo. From 1875 to 1879 he was a clerk in the U.S. consulate in Santo Domingo. Returning to the United States in 1879, he engaged in the West Indies mercantile trade while living in Corona, New York. In 1882, Charles moved back to Washington, D.C., and took a job as an examiner in the Pension Bureau, where he remained until 1892, when he, like his brother, entered the real estate business. , ser. 2, 3:860; , ser. 3, 1:126; McFeely, , 239, 257-58, 272; , 1:407-08.
sent a letter to you on monday night if he had not I should. I received also with your letter one from Miss Assing⁴Ottilie Assing. and one enclosed for Mrs Lehman from her. She is sighing for summer still, for she says it is only then that she enjoys herself. Miss Assing says she has one stupid girl to teach in the family where she lives⁵Ottilie Assing worked as a governess in the 1840s while living in Hamburg, Germany, but seems to have supported herself mainly by other means after moving to the United States in 1852. Indeed, after 1858 she lived on a combination of her earnings as a journalist and foreign correspondent and on the interest generated by investing the substantial sum of money she had inherited from her uncle Karl Varnhagen von Ense. While living in Hoboken, New Jersey (when she was not traveling or, after 1856, spending her summers in Frederick Douglass’s home), she devoted some time to tutoring the children of her friends Hans and Luise Kudlich. It is quite possible that she may have done the same thing for any child living at Mrs. Clara B. Marks’s home, on Washington Street in Hoboken, where she rented rooms from 1856 to 1865. , ser. 2, 3:834; Lohmann, , xiii-xvi, xxxiv, 365; Diedrich, , xvii, 113-15, 143, 203-07. and she thinks that if those stupid spirits⁶An allusion to the widespread interest in Spiritualism at the time. in whom those people believe or pretend to believe would, only manifest thier existence by influencing this girl with a little industry and concentration of mind, instead of upsetting tables, and performing other mischievous tricks, they would be of more account than they are. I am striving to do all I can with my music and grammar[.] I am certain that I understand the rudiments of grammar pretty well and music too; but I need practice with the latter. The Miss Riches’ were up on Friday night last and Miss Helen played a good part of the time she wishes me to come and see her very much[.] I have promised her that I would come and expected to go this week but think not now as M Beecher ts to lecture here two evenings⁷Henry Ward Beecher delivered a lecture titled “Wastes and Burdens of Society” in Rochester, New York, on 4 February 1859. Halford R. Ryan, (New York, 1990), 139. and I am going to hear him. I will be just as well contented if you find a situation for me while out west⁸Frederick Douglass was in Chicago at the time this letter was written. On 1 February 1859 he attended a formal reception held in his honor at the Jackson Street A.M.E. Church, organized by a group of Chicago’s black abolitionists. Over the next several days, he delivered a series of lectures at Metropolitan Hall. Afterward he spent seven weeks on a lecture tour across Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. He did not return to Rochester until the week of 18 March 1859. , 18 March 1859; , ser. 1, 3:xxix-xxx. for this summer and will go gladly. If you do get a place please get all the information you can about thier regulations. I wrote to M Clark⁹Probably Peter Humphries Clark (c. 1829-1925). Clark was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, but he was not (as tradition maintained) the grandson of the explorer William Clark. Recent scholarship has established that his grandfather was instead a Virginia-born planter named John Clarke, who settled in Harrison County, Kentucky, in 1798. Clark’s family was manumitted in 1814 in accordance with John Clarke’s will, and they moved in 1816 to Cincinnati, where they altered the spelling of their surname. Clark was educated in a school for black children started by the Reverend Hiram S. Gilmore. In 1849 he became a teacher in the first black public school in Cincinnati, although it took a two-year court suit to force city officials to pay his salary. In addition to teaching, Clark helped edit two Free Soil party papers in the Cincinnati area: the Wilmington and the Newport . For a brief time in 1856 he worked as an assistant editor on . In 1857, Clark returned to Cincinnati, where he became both principal and teacher at a black elementary school. He remained there until 1866, when he became principal of the city’s segregated high school. While principal of the high school, Clark attempted to organize black teachers for the National Labor Union. Disappointment with the Republicans’ failure to protect black civil rights led him to campaign for Cincinnati’s socialist Workingmen’s party in 1877. In later years he joined the Democratic party. Falling out of favor with Cincinnati’s African American community through a combination of his opposition to desegregation and charges that he had bribed a witness in a political corruption case in an effort to save political allies from going to jail, Clark was fired from his job in 1886. After a brief tenure as principal at the segregated State Normal and Industrial School at Huntsville, Alabama, Clark settled in St. Louis, where he taught in the segregated public schools until his retirement in 1908. , ser. 1, 3:134—35; Nikki M. Taylor, (Lexington, Ky., 2013); , 4: 943-45. before you went away asking him to let me know the salary for a teacher in thier primary department but have not received an answer yet. I expect one to night. It has been beautiful weather ever since you left and I do not think we will have much snow but it will be keen and sharp. Elizabeth¹⁰Possibly Elizabeth Smith Miller (1822-1911). Gerrit Smith’s only daughter, she became a women’s rights and dress reform activist. The Smith and Douglass families developed an unusually cordial cross-racial relationship in the 1850s. Elizabeth Smith Miller was a cousin and confidant of the women’s rights leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who had canceled her speaking engagements that winter in anticipation of a child due in March 1859. Miller later defended her father’s legacy, even causing the removal of any mention of a connection with John Brown from the “authorized” biography written by Octavius Brooks Frothingham. Stanton and Anthony, , 1:383-84; Harlow, , 16-17, 32, 42-43, 54, 118, 129, 454; McKivigan, “Frederick Douglass-Gerrit Smith Friendship,” 205-32. is making preparations to read her lecture next Monday night and leave us on Tuesday or Wednesday of