Rosetta Douglass to Frederick Douglass, October 9, 1862
ROSETTA DOUGLASS TO FREDERICK DOUGLASS
Salem[, N.J.] 9 October [18]62[.]
MY DEAR FATHER
Yours of the 4th inst1This letter has not survived. arrived night before last and found me more than
usual wearied with my days work for in the first place one of my scholars
had several fits which frightened me as I had never seen any one in a fit
and as she would stay at school I was worried all day. Lewis2Lewis H. Douglass. use to think
I would make a pretty severe School mistress but I do not think I can be
as all my scholars appear to love me and the school was noted as being
a very bad one and from what I see of it when I visited it last summer I
thought so too but now it is very orderly and the scholars more or less are
attentive and I flatter myself with the idea that by my own Superior man-
agement that is superior to those who were before me is the sole cause of
the change. I am careful of my change and I make a few cents at spare
times by knitting edging and doing embroidery I am doing a peice now for
the lady with whom I board who is doing my washing and ironing for pay
and just now it is quite well for me that she can do it. I have done it since
I have been in my school but I find it rather difficult and go to school too,
my walk is a mile and a half from my boarding place I walk it in twenty
five minutes. With my night school and knitting and embroidery I can
make sufficient pin money and save my salary which is my object. My
Evening school will commence next tuesday evening if nothing prevents.
My evenings are tuesday Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, as Monday
and Saturday my pupils being mostly those at service could not come on
those evenings. Oh! I trust I shall succeed in finding employment. I was
greatly surprised to find the little Sum of money you so generously sent
me. I thank you very much for it. I often think of your loneliness for I well
perceive the necessity of congenial companion I have felt it since I left
home. I flatter myself if I were at home I might in a measure contribute
to your happiness as well as to mother’s, I think my position in the fam-
ily rather a singular one or rather I feel it to be so for I wish to be all you
would have me be and I wish also to do something to make mother happy
and if both were interested in the same pursuits it would be much easier
for me [to do that] what I wish to be a comfort to both parents. Most of
my ideas of morality and uprightness of character I have learned from
you father, for though I never said much when our table talks were going
on I made resolutions to follow your lessons, so that I am safe to say that
although you may think you were talking in vain here is one that remem-
bers, my reading has done much, and for smaller things also mother has
given some counsel. Father you are mistaken in supposing that I spread
family differences or in suspecting that to be the Cause of Sarah’s3Sarah Anne Dorsey Seville. pert-
ness for Sarah’s conduct began strange after the first two or three days I
was there so far as that is concerned my opinion of Sarah or any of them
is none of the best, The language and manners in the family was enough
to disgust me. For however much I became vexed or angry I should not
curse and there it struck me after the second night I was there when Mary4Mary Louise Dorsey Harlan (c.1849-1901) was the youngest of Thomas J. and Louise Tobias Dorsey’s three children. Like her siblings, Mary was born in Philadelphia. In the early 1870s, she married the Cincinnati native Robert J. Harlan, Jr. (853-?). . He was the only child of Robert J. Harlan (c. 1816-97), a former slave who was an acknowledged half brother of Justice John Marshall Harlan. Robert Harlan’s first wife was Josephine Floyd (reputed to have been the daughter of Governor John B. Floyd of Virginia). The marriage produced two daughters, Caroline and Louise Harlan. In 1879, following the death of her mother, Mary Dorsey Harlan took over the Dorseys’ home while engaged in a dispute with her surviving sibling, William Henry Dorsey, for control of their parents’ estate. In 1880, however, she was arrested (under the name Mary L. “Minnie” Dorsey) for running a “disorderly house” (brothel) at a different address from the home she shared with her husband and daughters. Following her conviction, Mary Dorsey Harlan served three months in jail, and by the next year she was living in Washington, D.C., where her husband had found a job in the postal service. The family remained in Washington, D.C., until 1884, when Robert Harlan, Jr., chose to return to Cincinnati alone. The Harlan’s daughters were sent to live with their mother’s relatives in Philadelphia, where they spent the rest of their lives. Nothing more is known of Mary Dorsey Harlan’s life between her separation from her husband and her death in Washington, D.C. 1850 U.S. Census, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia County, 147; Loren P. Beth, John Marshall Harlan: The Last Whig Justice (Lexington, Ky., 1992), 12-13; Ronald Shannon, Profiles in Ohio History: A Legacy of African American Achievement (Bloomington, Ind., 2008), 33-35; Lane, William Dorsey’s Philadelphia, 60, 301-03.
used improper language to her sister[.] No it was not that for I never speak
nor did speak of my home except with pleasure and contrasted with the
Dorsey’s5Thomas and Louise Dorsey. I could but speak of it in that light. And you also mistake when
I wrote that Uncle’s family6 The family of Perry and Elizabeth Wilmer. was a happy one but poor. I had just left
Philadelphia and was so unhappy there that when I came here and found
this family so pleasant with itself I could [illegible] make the contrast. I
had no thought of home at that time, for I have seen no home since I left
Rochester any happier than our own for I find every family has a some-
thing. Father I trust I have too great a family pride, pride for yourself to
say any thing to make people acquainted with such things with which
they have no business. I have not been asked any impertinent questions
about my home indeed no questions at all, except what Aunt Elizabeth7Elizabeth Wilmer.
came and told me she had heard I was sent from home on account of my
ill conduct that you and mother could not live with me, but as I knew that
was so untrue I did not allow it to disturb me. Our home I should like to
help keep and as this is my first attempt and first year I have used in trying
to make a start I cannot do much if anything. I have begun now and I will
strive to make another year more profitable to me as well as others. I have
started out in rather hard times. I knew I made many mistakes in my last
letter for I was worried and I wished to tell you so much, all at once that
I wrote just as I speak sometimes in haste to get everything at once, and
then I arose so early one morning to finish it in time for the mail. When
I go to Philadelphia I will go to Mrs [Hurn’s]8Probably Sarah Griffin Hurn (c. 1818-?), the daughter of Gershom and Hannah Hoxie Griffin of Gates, New York, and wife of John W. Hurn (1823-87), the English-born telegraph operator who suppressed the telegram that ordered Frederick Douglass’s arrest for complicity in the Harpers Ferry raid. For most of their life in Philadelphia, John Hurn’s primary occupation appears to have been photography. By 1880, the Hurns were living in Vineland, New Jersey, where Sarah was active in the National Woman Suffrage Association. 1850 U.S. Census, New York, Monroe County, 258; 1860 U.S. Census, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia County, 284-85; 1870 U.S. Census, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia County, 68; 1880 U.S. Census, New Jersey, Cumberland County, 33; Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, eds., National Woman Suffrage Association, Report of the Sixteenth Annual Washington Convention, March 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th, 1884 (Rochester, 1884), 140; Douglass Papers, ser. 2, 3:833. for I wish you to see how
large I have grown. My dresses that I had made last winter are too tight
for me I am fearful now I am to be large like Aunt Charlotte9Charlotte Murray (c. 1820-?) was the younger sister of Anna Murray Douglass. She obtained a certificate of freedom in Caroline County, Maryland, in 1832 and probably joined other family members, including Anna, in Baltimore at that time. By 1850, Murray was a member of Frederick Douglass’s household in Rochester. 1850 U.S. Census, New York, Monroe County, 318; Archives of Maryland Online, Caroline County, Certificates of Freedom, 1827-1857. I hope not
for I am not as tall. No I have no need to parade destitution on my part
for I have everything to carry me through for sometime yet as regards
clothing[.] Mrs Reckless10Amy Hester Reckless. when I thanked her but hoped she would not
think of such a thing said she wished to make me some present for some
time and could think of nothing but shoes and as she persisted I accepted,
but as I said I have no need to represent myself destitute for I have shoes
by me to last me through the fall. Yes I had heard or at least seen the
notice of the death of Rev. Mr Pryne11Seriously ill from typhoid fever, Abram Pryne committed suicide with a razor in his home in Williamson, Wayne County, New York, on Saturday, 20 September 1862. New York Times, 5 October 1862; Lib., 3 October 1862.
last Saturday in the Tribune12Abram Pryne’s suicide was mentioned twice in the New York Tribune. A short article printed on 23 September 1862 mentioned that he had suffered from ill health, and claimed his suicide occurred “whilst laboring under a fit of insanity.” A longer piece, an editorial printed on 25 September 1862, criticized the hostile comments regarding Pryne made by the Albany Atlas & Argus, and claimed Pryne was “a gentleman of pure and blameless life” who obeyed the calling to fight against “the most gigantic crime of the age.” New York Tribune, 23, 25 September 1862. and
the mean article copied from the Argus.13Rosetta Douglass alludes to an undated article on Abram Pryne’s suicide from the pro-Democratic party newspaper the Albany (New York) Atlas & Argus, which was reprinted in Douglass’ Monthly. Among other hostile comments in that article was the statement “His association with Fred. Douglass, and other black and white Abolitionists, had rendered him rabid in his disunionism and his hatred of the Constitution.” , 5:724 (October 1862). It brought before me the [illeg-
ible] of the John Brown Raid with all its sorrows as that was the winter I
became a little acquainted with Mrs. Pryne[.] How sad it is I wish much
to see your Monthly for October it has not come yet. Mrs Reckless has a
friend who takes the Tribune and she has kindly got her friend to save me
up the dailies and I go every saturday and get them so that was the way I
heard of the sad fate of Mr Pryne. I have got my shawl from Dorsey’s after
having sent the fifth time. Miss Adams sent me this week a couple of the
Rochester Express one of which contained your letter to Senator Blair on
the Central American scheme.14Rosetta Douglass refers to her father’s letter of 16 September 1862 to Postmaster General Montgomery Blair, published in the October issue of Douglass’ Monthly and reprinted in other periodicals. The letter is also reprinted earlier in this volume. , 5: 724-26 (October 1862). I [was] glad to get it for I had not seen it
but have seen several persons who had read it. I suppose I shall see it in
the Monthly. I hope it will come soon. I see that Redpath has resigned15In October 1862, after two years of little success in recruiting African Americans to immigrate to the Caribbean republic of Haiti, James Redpath resigned as the director of the Haytian Emigration Bureau. Redpath declared that he still believed “that the negro race, like the old Israelits will be taken out of this country, and led into fairer lands.” ., 3 October, 7 November 1862; McKivigan, , 82. and the Pine and Palm16The Pine and Palm was the official publication of the Haitian Emigration Bureau, which was directed by James Redpath. In March 1861, Redpath had purchased the New York Weekly Anglo-African, the nation’s largest circulating blacked-edited periodical, and renamed it the Pine and Palm to advance editorially the recruitment of African American immigrants to Haiti. While Redpath hired the African American George L. Lawrence as editor, he kept a close personal rein on the Pine and Palm’s contents, and the Haitian effort provoked anger among many Northern blacks and abolitionists. James McCune Smith financed a resurrection of the Weekly Anglo-African to oppose emigration. The newspaper ceased publication when Redpath resigned as director of the bureau. McKivigan, , 69-71, 77-78, 80-82.
has fallen. Is there any prospect of your going to
Hayti? I do not see how you can go now. The clock is striking eleven and
I must to bed. I should think it costs something to go to Syracuse so often
unless Lewis has a free pass.17Lewis H. Douglass’s frequent trips to Syracuse in 1862 can be explained by the fact that he was courting Helen Amelia Loguen (1843-1936). At the time, her father, James Wesley Loguen, was the minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion church in Syracuse. The couple became engaged in 1863, but did not marry until 1869. Sterling, , 189; McFeely, 222.
I am glad to know he is growing fine look-
ing. I did not use to think he was but I noticed within the last year or two a
change, a little of the sharp edge taken off and he will do. I think I see him
give me a queer look at this criticism on his manners. My love to Mother
and Lewis Frederick and Charles,18Charles R. Douglass. & Aunt Charlotte and all friends
Much to Yourself
I remain Your Affectionate Daughter
ROSETTA DOUGLASS
[P.S.] Please don’t grow despondent. and write soon.
ALS: General Correspondence File, reel 1, frames 740-44, FD Papers, DLC.