FROM OUR NEW YORK CORRESPONDENT.

The reciprocal relations of the Free Color
ed People and the American Anti-Slavery
Society, form a subject of intense interest at
this moment: it is admitted that these two
classes of persons stand aloof from each oth
er: they ought to be allied and bound to
gether by hooks of steel—for the one class is
Anti-Slavery by the seal of God upon their
brows, the other class is Anti Slavery by that
"new birth" wherewith noble and energetic
natures have been awakened to a sense of the
sin and shame wherewith Slavery curses the
land—the twain ought to be, but, are not,
one flesh.

The why and the wherefore of this disseverance is a serious question: it is not answered by the statement that the Colored People are governed by Pro-Slavery influences. In the light which Anti-Slavery has shed upon them, if they remain Pro-Slavery, then is one Anti-Slavery argument silenced—to wit, that this portion of God's creatures are fit for Freedom, even in part.

The statement of the organ of the American Anti-Slavery Society "that the colored people have ever kept aloof from the AntiSlavery movement," would help solve the question, if it were a true statement; but it is not. For there was a time when the colored people were identified with that movement—nay, they almost began the present movement; they certainly ante-dated many of its principles. In 1810, while New York was yet a slave State, a long array of colored men marched through this city, in open day, bearing a banner inscribed with the portrait of a colored man, and the words

"Am I not a Man and a Brother?"

And they did this in spite of the earnest remonstrances of the abolitionists of that day. In 1813, when Pennsylvania was about to enact a law requiring every colored person to be registered, the law was opposed in a series of brilliant letters, written by "a man of color," letters containing sentiments promulgated twenty years afterwards as new Anti-Slavery truth. They may be found reprinted in the "Freedom's Journal for March, 1828," a paper edited by Rev. J. E. Cornish and J. B. Russwurum, colored men. The statement of the "Organ" is not true, moreover, because, the very sun in the Anti-Slavery firmament which that "organ" adores, was nurtured into warmth, clothed with lustre and shot up into mid air by the hot sympathies of colored men's bosoms. 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. and the Liberator owe their evangel to the free colored people: hethought material and material aid, in the early darkest days of both, came largely from the colored people. "Garrison's Thoughts on Colonization" are but splendid comments on principles announced many years before, and lived up to till the present moment by the colored people. Mr. Garrison came on one platform, and remains on it, in this matter, in which the eloquence of words belongs to him, of action to us: our action ante-dating his words, and giving force to them: our action embracing a new principle, grander than that announced by the May Flower's people when they landed on Plymouth Rock. It is the princple of resisting oppression on the spot, against all odds, in contradistinction to the principle of flying from oppression.

In beginning his warfare against slavery, in the first number of the Liberator, like Jackson on the eve of battle before New Orleans, Mr. Garrison made his last appeal to

"OUR FREE COLORED BRETHREN."

"Your moral and intellectual elevation, the advancement of your rights, and the defence of your character will be a leading object of our paper. We know that you are now struggling against wind and tide, and that 'adversity has marked you for its own,' yet among three hundred thousand of your number some patronage may be given. We ask and

expect but little; that little may save the life of the ."

How this "appeal" was met, may be inferred from the fact that during the first four years of its existence, five-sixths of the most active agents for the , (the names are contained in its columns,) were colored men. The Beils, (Fylbel,) Hogarths, Stewards in New York, the Bemans in Connecticut, the Pompeys and Johnsons (not Oliver) in Massachusetts, the Casseys, Vashons, Whippers and Pecks in Pennsylvania, and Watkins in Baltimore, were the colored men who planted the , and unfurled the of the incipient gathering "host" in the period of its young helplessness. It is quite refreshing to look over the of those days, and read how prettily Mr. Garrison writes of Mr Purvis as "a young colored gentleman," (twenty odd years after a "colored man,") and of a meetings of "gentlemen of color" at Rochester, New York, Philadelphia, &c, &c., to support and circulate the . "All went merrily as a marriage bell:" in this honeymoon of the Anti Slavery movement, the smiles, caresses, blandishments, and terms of fondness, were tossed backwards and forwards—reciprocally—so assiduously, that although Mr. Garrison sometimes "blushed," at an unusually warm hug, it was hard to tell which loved the other most, Mr. Garrison the Colored People, or the Colored People Mr. Garrison. Mr. Garrison advised colored colored conventions, national and annual, for the elevation of the Colored People: they were held: he attended them: gave some good advice and received some.

But all at once "a change came o'er, &c, &c." On this good, warm soil the had grown beyod the measure of colordom: these agents names were—erased from its columns. And on Jan. 3d, 1835, came

"A NOTICE TO SUBSCRIBERS.

Mr. Benjamin Bacon (white man) is ap
pointed General Agent to the Liberator—
All monies due for past subscriptions to our
paper must be paid to us. All due from the
commencement of the present volume must
be paid to him, &c.

GARRISON & KNAPP."

Also,

"PHILADELPHIANS—TAKE NOTICE!

The New England Anti-Slavery Society
having constituted the subscriber sole agent
of the Liberator for this city, &c., &c.

Signed, ARNOLD BUFFUM" (White man.)

Where are the colored gentlemen agents now? Out of the forty who had stood by the Liberator and upheld it in the day of its struggling adversity, was there no one fit for the office of agent when that office paid?—There were dozens, but they were passed over, whenever money began to flow in, and white men placed in their stead: and this course of conduct, call it Garrisonism, or what you will, has ever marked the subsequent history of the "host." Talk of colored men's ingratitude to Mr. Garrison, why the sheerist mite of gratitude, not to say two [sic] manly feeling on his part, would have led him to select a colored man for his agent, when it did pay, in return for what they had done when it did not pay to be agent.

Who pushed colored men off that platform?

This historical view of the reciprocal relations, &c, &c., is a subject so rich and interesting, that I will continue it. Enough has been said to show that the colored people have not always held aloof from the Anti-Slavery movement.

* * * * * * *

Wendell Phillip's lecture at the Tabernacle was attended by about thirteen hundred people, Henry Ward Beecher's by a thousand more. Neither speaker seemed at ease. I think both, in view of Messrs. Storrs and Bellows' efforts, aimed too high. There was a constraint about Mr. Phillips, which took away that smooth fine polish with which his spoken words are wont to cut the air.—Mr. Beecher read his lecture, which he should never do: blunt outness must ever be his forte. On the same night when Mr. Beecher lectured, there was gathered in Shiloh Church some seven hundred of "our people" listening to a complimentary concert to Professor Judson, on Paganini: he can play on the violin. The elite of New York and Philadelphia gave brilliancy to the vocal and instrumental music. It passed off splendidly, except that Fylbel, like Olly at the Tabernacle, would get on the platform and throw sheep's eyes at the pretty girls.

Yours,

CommunipawSmith, James McCune

James McCune Smith (1813–65), a prominent black physician, abolitionist, and writer, was born in New York City to an enslaved father and a self-emancipated mother. He attended the New York African Free School, but was denied admission to Columbia University, Geneva Medical College, and the New York Academy of Medicine. He turned to the University of Glasgow in Scotland, where he received a B.A. (1835), M.A. (1836), and M.D. (1837). Upon returning to New York, he opened a pharmacy and medical practice that catered to both blacks and whites. He became involved in the abolitionist movement, serving as an associate editor of the Colored American in 1839, contributed regularly to the Anglo-African Magazine, and wrote correspondence for the North Star and Frederick Douglass’ Paper under the pseudonym “Communipaw.” Smith also wrote the introduction to Douglass’s second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855). In 1861, Smith helped finance the revival of the Weekly Anglo-African to oppose black colonization and emigration, and he was a prominent member of the New York City Young Men’s Association, the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, and the New York African Society for Mutual Relief. He was the sole attending physician of the Society for the Promotion of Education Among Colored Children, a member and vestryman of St. Philip’s Episcopal Church, and a trustee of the New York Society for the Promotion of Education Among Colored Children. In 1863 Wilberforce College appointed Smith professor of anthropology, but illness kept him from assuming his post. Lib., 1 June 1838; FDP, 18 May 1855; Douglass Papers, ser. 2:7–19; Miller, Search for a Black Nationality, 243; Pease and Pease, They Who Would Be Free, 90–92, 103, 110; Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 115, 134; Rhoda G. Freeman, “The Free Negro in New York City in the Era before the Civil War” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1966), 40–42, 177, 186, 195, 200, 247, 276, 286, 325, 353, 393; DAB, 27:288–89.

New York, Jan. 20th, 1855