Introduction to Volume Two
John R. McKivigan

In this collection, the second of five contemplated volumes of Frederick
Douglass’s correspondence, the editors have followed the selection prin
ciples laid out in the editorial method published in volume 1. The current
volume covers correspondence to and from Douglass in the years 1853 to
1865. The Douglass Papers staff located 1,255 letters for this time period
and selected 219, or just over 17 percent, of them for publication. The re
maining 1,036 letters are summarized in the volume’s calendar.

Of the 1,255 letters, 286 were autograph letters, written in the author’s
hand. These letters were recovered by the project from thirty-eight re
positories in the United States and Great Britain. Two hundred eighteen of
the autograph letters, or approximately 75 percent of them, were found in
three libraries: the Library of Congress, the Syracuse University Library,
and the University of Rochester Library. For this volume, the project se
lected and reproduced 134 of these autograph letters, from thirty-two dif
ferent repositories.

Of the remaining 969 letters, the closest known source to the original
manuscript letter for all but four documents is a text printed in a newspaper
from the era. Douglass’s letters were discovered in fourteen newspapers
of the period, but 943, nearly 90 percent, were first published in one of
the two newspapers edited by Douglass himself, the Frederick Douglass’
Paper and Douglass’ Monthly. The project reproduced 84, less than 9 per
cent, of these letters that have survived only in an earlier printed form.

Of the 219 letters selected for publication in this volume, 115 were
written by Douglass and 104 were written to him. Although this ratio of
letters to and from Douglass is almost even, 87 percent (1,095/1,255) of
all surviving letters from this time period were written to him. Thus, the
letters chosen for inclusion here represent over 70 percent (115/162) of
those written by Douglass, compared to just under 10 percent (104/1,093)
of those written to him. This seeming imbalance is understandable, since
many of the unprinted letters (listed in the calendar) were written to
Douglass as a newspaper editor and lacked substantive content, repeti
tively expressed an opinion, or simply reported an event.

In the letters for this time period, Douglass’s correspondents represent
not only many of the leading names in the antislavery movement on both

sides of the Atlantic, but also many less well-remembered figures in a va
riety of reform movements. Likewise, a significant number of women and
African Americans are numbered among the correspondents.

The letters in this volume follow Douglass as he searched for more
beneficial alliances and more effective tactics in the battle against slavery.
By 1853, the estrangement from his original abolitionist mentors, follow
ers of the Boston editor William Lloyd GarrisonGarrison, William Lloyd

William Lloyd Garrison (1805-79) was the foremost white abolitionist of the nineteenth century and was credited with the discovery of Douglass as a speaker at an antislavery meeting in Nantucket in 1841. He began his career as an apprentice printer on the Newburyport (Mass.) Herald at the age of thirteen. Garrison became editor of the Newburyport Free Press in 1826, but the paper closed within a year. He was then associated with a series of periodicals in Boston that advocated reform before Benjamin Lundy offered the young journalist the opportunity to write for his antislavery newspaper. Garrison joined Lundy in editing the Genius of Universal Emancipation in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1829, during the last year of the paper's 1821-1830 run. In 1830 a libel suit against the editors forced the paper to close and landed Garrison in jail. After his release, he courted the wealthy merchants of New York and Boston in order to start the Liberator (1831-65), a weekly journal based in Boston in which he advocated an immediate end to slavery. Garrison's brand of abolition condemned any institution that would tolerate the existence of slavery, including churches, political parties. and even the United States itself and any scheme aimed at removing black people from the country. Instead, Garrison hoped to raise the public's awareness that slavery was morally wrong and thereby force its end in an almost millennial moment of emancipation. His approach appealed to both white and black antislavery advocates but earned him many enemies among those only moderately opposed to slavery and slaveholders alike. Seeing the need for greater action and organization beyond the pages of the Liberator; Garrison joined with other abolitionists to form the New England Anti-Slavery Society in 1831. Two years later he helped found the larger American Anti-Slavery Society. In 1833 he established ties with English abolitionists after a trip to Great Britain, and he later brought the noted and notorious speaker George Thompson to the United States for a tour. Garrison also dedicated himself to women's rights, encouraging women to enter the public sphere by inviting them, via the Liberator, to form female antislavery societies. In addition to the thirty-three women's antislavery societies that flourished by 1838, Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society welcomed women as well as blacks into its ranks. However, female delegates were excluded from the World's Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840 in London. The issue of women's participation in the antislavery movement and Garrison's absolute refusal to turn to politics to end slavery caused a division in the American Anti-Slavery Society. Brothers Lewis and Arthur Tappan, who opposed women's acting as speakers and who hoped to use politics toward abolition, broke with Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society, forming the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, or the "New Organization" in 1841. Garrison's ideas were so closely associated with the "Old Organization" that the American Anti-Slavery Society became known simply as the "Garrisonians." With the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, Garrison believed that he had accomplished his life's work and that of the antislavery movement. He then resigned from the presidency of the American Anti-Slavery Society and closed the Liberator. Wendell Phillips Garrison and Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879: The Story of His Life Told by His Children, 4 vols. (New York, 188589); Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York, 1998); James Brewer Stewart, William Lloyd Garrison and the Challenge of Emancipation (Arlington Heights, Ill., 1992); John L. Thomas, The Liberator: William Lloyd Garrison (Boston, 1963); Dictionary of American Biography, 20 vols. (New York, 1928-36), 7:168-72. , reached the point that
almost no communication between Douglass and this group occurred un
til after the Civil War’s conclusion. Instead, Douglass moved closer to the
political abolition camp led by the wealthy New Yorker Gerrit SmithSmith, Gerrit

Gerrit Smith (1797– 1874), a New York businessman and land speculator, became best known for his philanthropic work for such reform causes as temperance and abolition. Between 1828 and 1835, he donated large sums of money to the American Colonization Society, but abandoned that movement in 1835 when his sympathies shifted to the immediate abolitionists. In the 1840s, he gave approximately 140,000 acres of land in upstate New York to three thousand black settlers, thus qualifying them to vote. Smith was a founder and frequent candidate of the Liberty party, running for governor of New York on that ticket in 1840 and winning a seat in Congress in 1852. When the Free Soil merger with moderate antislavery Democrats and Whigs lured away many Liberty party supporters, Smith helped bankroll that organization until 1860. Smith befriended Douglass when the latter moved to Rochester, and Smith frequently helped finance Frederick Douglass’ Paper. Like Douglass, Smith supported John Brown, but psychological stress caused by the failure at Harpers Ferry brought on the first of a series of bipolar episodes that greatly reduced his subsequent reform activities. Ralph Volney Harlow, Gerrit Smith: Philanthropist and Reformer (1939; New York, 1972); Gerald Sorin, The New York Abolitionists: A Case Study of Political Radicalism (Westport, Conn., 1971), 269– 87; Lewis Perry, Radical Abolitionism: Anarchy and the Government of God in Antislavery Thought (Ithaca, N.Y., 1973), 170– 80; John R. McKivigan and Madeleine Leveille, “The ‘Black Dream’ of Gerrit Smith, New York Abolitionist,” Syracuse University Library Associates Courier, 20:61– 76 (Fall 1985); NCAB , 2:322– 23; DAB, 17:270– 71. . Nu
merous letters between the two men document Douglass’s great financial
dependence on Smith to maintain his journalistic operation.

Douglass’s devoted editorial assistant, the visiting British abolitionist
Julia Griffiths, figured in Douglass’s correspondence with other abolition
ists, and the letters reveal her major role in keeping the paper afloat. She
acted both as an intermediary with Smith and as a tireless fund-raiser who
sought alternative revenue sources for Douglass. Following Griffiths’s re
turn to Great Britain in the summer of 1855, the Douglass-Smith corre
spondence records the gradual deterioration of the finances of Douglass’s
editorial operations.

Now separated by an ocean from her reform partner, Julia Griffiths
emerged as a significant new voice in Douglass’s correspondence. She
sent him a stream of letters recounting her travels throughout England
and Scotland to set up female abolitionist societies to collect funds for the
Frederick Douglass’ Paper. Griffiths’s presence in Britain appears to have
stimulated an increase in the correspondence received from abolitionists
whom Douglass had met during his visit there in the mid-1840s.

In 1855, Douglass published his second of three autobiographies, My
Bondage and My Freedom. His correspondence contains interesting de
tails on the book’s composition, the praise he received from readers, and
his efforts to expand its sales. A great deal of Douglass’s surviving cor
respondence documents the intense lecturing schedule he maintained on
behalf of the abolitionist cause. He recounts frequent tribulations with
the nation’s inadequate transportation system, made worse by encounters
with racial discrimination. To friends, Douglass’s letters revealed that his
demanding lecturing tours habitually left him exhausted and hoarse—or
worse, seriously ill.

Other letters provide insights into Douglass’s attitudes toward causes
such as woman suffrage, Spiritualism, and hydropathy. In 1858, Douglass

wrote a letter to the Rochester press declaring that he had never endured
more public opposition in his adopted hometown than when he spoke at a
woman suffrage event there with Susan B. Anthony. The next year, a long
time Rochester abolitionist friend, Amy Post, wrote Douglass to appeal
that he keep an open mind about the spiritualism she and her husband,
Isaac, had embraced. Another abolitionist, James CatlinCatlin, James

James Catlin (1824–90) was a farmer and physician who lived in Warren County, Pennsylvania. He was known to be active in aiding fugitive slaves. Catlin began aiding fugitives in college, hiding them in his room. He married his wife, Martha Van Rensselaer, another physician and abolitionist. James and his brother, Henry, began publishing the True American in Erie, Pennsylvania in 1853, using their print shop as a safehouse until fugitives could be ferried over Lake Erie. 1850, 1860, and 1880 U. S. Census, Sugar Grove, Warren, Pennsylvania; Mary D. Putnam, “Connections with the Miller House,” Stepping Stones, 64:2887 (May 2020); Mary Ellen Snodgrass, ed., The Underground Encyclopedia: An Encyclopedia, 2 vols. (New York: Routledge, 2015), 1:106. , counseled Doug
lass on the superiority of water cures to the medicines prescribed by the
physicians of the era.

Douglass’s correspondence displays his leading role in trying to
unite northern free blacks in a national council to demand equal rights.
Many letters expose the controversy that occurred when Douglass’s at
tempts to create a manual-labor college for African American students
went aground after Harriet Beecher Stowe failed to raise her anticipated
share of the funds for the project. For the next several years, letters docu
ment the bitter infighting in black circles, which intensified after Doug
lass’s former editorial associate Martin Delany began to promote African
emigration; it continued until the decade’s end, when the Haitian govern
ment attempted to recruit free American blacks to emigrate. Many other
letters from the 1850s recount the numerous obstacles that free African
Americans encountered in economic life, employment, and politics. In
letters addressed to Douglass as a newspaper editor and in private cor
respondence, disputes over colonization, education, religion, temperance,
and economic opportunity were as common as discussions of antislavery
tactics. In the late 1850s, the focus of much of Douglass’s correspondence
with other black leaders shifted to discussing efforts to obtain equal rights
in the northern states.

Among his white correspondents, Douglass demonstrated the highest
degree of intimacy with Gerrit Smith. He wrote Smith often while the lat
ter was serving a single term in the U.S. House of Representatives. Smith’s
brief tenure there coincided with the debates over the Kansas-Nebraska
Act, which rejuvenated northern moderate antislavery sentiment. Doug
lass corresponded with several leaders of the newly founded Republican
party, including William H. Seward and Charles Sumner. Such letters re
veal Douglass, and many other black abolitionists, as wavering in their
support between Smith’s radical political abolitionists and the Republi
cans in both the 1856 and 1860 presidential campaigns and the 1858 New
York state elections. Many letters display severe disappointment that most
northern whites were content to halt slavery’s expansion rather than force
its end in the southern states.

Such sentiment helps explain Douglass’s move in the 1850s toward
the use of violent antislavery tactics. Several letters in this volume recount
details of the Underground Railroad aiding slaves to escape, which in
clude the use of force to resist attempts by authorities to return runaways
to their owners. In often cryptically worded correspondence, Douglass
and other “operators” reveal a highly organized network used to hasten
runaway slaves to safer locations. John Brown and other correspondents
provided reports directly from the Kansas Territory on the intensifying
free-state struggle there. Given the conspiratorial nature of the event, only
a few tantalizing hints regarding the Harpers Ferry raid are hidden in this
correspondence. Following that bloody encounter, several letters between
Douglass and other abolitionists recount his hasty flight out of the country
to evade arrest for his assistance to Brown.

Douglass’s correspondence reveals that he was unhappy with the
tepid antislavery position of Abraham Lincoln and the Republican party
during the 1860 election campaign and even following secession and the
start of the Civil War. The Emancipation Proclamation pleased Douglass,
and several private meetings with the president caused some improvement
in their relationship, but his letters document that Douglass still supported
the abortive efforts to replace Lincoln with a different Republican presi
dential candidate in 1864.

A large number of letters during the war years detail Douglass’s ac
tivities as a recruiter of African Americans for the Union army. These
letters display Douglass’s anger when the federal government reneged on
its promise to give him an officer’s commission, ultimately causing his
resignation. Despite this grievance, two of Douglass’s three sons entered
Union army ranks. Lewis H. Douglass’s letters to his father provide in
teresting accounts of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry Regiment,
including the unit’s participation in the calamitous assault on Fort Wagner
in South Carolina in July 1864. Charles R. Douglass sent his father letters
recounting the Fifth Massachusetts Cavalry Regiment’s action in combat
before Petersburg, Virginia, and as guard troops for Confederate prison
ers of war in Maryland. At the war’s end, Lewis sent his father word that
he had managed to locate several relatives in Talbot County, Maryland,
with whom the elder Douglass had had no contact for a quarter century.

Letters from other Douglass children also play an interesting part in
this volume. Only a single letter from his youngest daughter, Annie, who
died in 1860, has survived, but her older sister Rosetta kept her father well
informed about her education and the start of her teaching career. The lat-

ter’s letters, in particular, provide valuable observations on issues of class
and color inside the African American community. A different insight
into Douglass’s family life comes from letters from Ottilie Assing, the
German immigrant journalist who became his intimate confidante. Such
familial and other personal letters play a much larger role in Douglass’s
correspondence in the three remaining volumes of this series.

The conclusion of the second volume of the Correspondence Series
brings Douglass to a critical moment in his own life as well as in the his
tory of the antislavery movement and the nation itself. The end of slavery
and the Civil War in 1865 promised a new day for African Americans.
Future volumes will reveal that both Douglass’s public career and the
struggle for racial justice in the United States were far from over.