For Frederick Douglass' Paper.

FROM OUR BROOKLYN CORRESPONDENT.

MY DEAR DOUGLASS:—I had laid my much worn pen aside, not again to resume it soon; but, like a scar covered warrior, who, thinking he can retire, suddenly finds himself seized by an irresistible impulse to again grapple hand to hand in the heat and and strife of contest at the sound of the drum, I, Ethiop, come again to the engagement.—Indeed, I find so much going on around me here, that inactivity can terminate only innsensibility. True, the weightier matters of the law I leave for yourself, 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. , Oliver, Langston, Purvis, 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 such like, to discuss and settle—mine is to cater only what will foster happiness, what will make us sing "Life let us cherish"—mine is to point to the path where flowers grow—to decoy the care-worn and weary in the great rugged highway, and those just entering it, to shaded river banks and silver streams, where rest and buoyancy may be found.

Concerts have been the order of the week hereabouts—two of which, given in Brooklyn, were as dissimilar in their object, as they were different in their caste. The one, at the Athenaeum, was given by the whites, for the benefit of the starving whites—the other in Siloam by its choir, (colored, of course,) for the advancement of music. The former, purported to be of high character; the pieces difficult of execution, and little understood, I venture to say, by many who attended; while the other was simple in its pretensions, and effective in execution, going directly to the heart. It is a question, after all, whether music far-fetched and complicated, though quite grammatical enough and artistic, is really the best. Music has its foundation in nature; and hence it is a question whether this straining after-effect is not a distortion of nature, and ineffective, loosing its grandeur, sublimity and beauty.

I may, notwithstanding, give this Concordia Association of Siloam a gentle hint, that may benefit them. Let its members, as often as possible, attend concerts purporting to be of high order, that they may witness their excellencies, and incorporate them in their own methods. In this way, they may chip off much of their stiffishness, resultant from timidity, which is perfectly natural in young beginners, and acquire more of that grace necessary to render their execution in the highest degree pleasing to themselves,

as well as interesting to their host of admirers. This, with a strict adherence to the development of their fine natural powers, the Concordia Association may make itself one of the finest musical associations inBrooklyn. Their first effort was a good one. Let their continuance be onward and upward.

Winter, with his icy hand and firm grip, is freezing and punching the life out of many a poor way-farer here, in Gotham; and to stay his ravage, calico balls and soup kitchens have been brought into requisition by the rich, and soup ladled out daily to thousands of hungry creatures. Gotham is, I believe, the metropolis of America—the boasted centre of civilization—the seat of material prosperity—the focus of moral, mental and religious light. Palaces, towers and spires, in gorgeous array, benignly smile up in the face of heaven, as much as to say, Behold our perfection! Looking down from thence, and viewing Gotham from this point, might it not be well to get the Historical Society, or, better, the Geographical Society of which friend Communipaw is a member, to enquire of some one of the world's strolling scribblers to ascertain how many of the indigent women of Kamskatka and Nootka Sound have been dressed in calico gowns to keep life from going out by frost, and how many soup houses have been put up in Timbuctoo, Ethiopia, &c., to feed starving wretches this year. Let some one of them get up a paper upon the subject, for comparison's sake. Also, let that portion of the religious world, about Gotham, whose business it is to mould her institutions to its own notion, and hence responsible for what we have—I say, let it get up a tract upon soup kitchens, and starvation, rags and wretchedness in general, in the year of grace 1855, in the middle of Gotham, the focus of religious light in America and Americans, say in the world—said tract for purely missionary purposes—distribution among the heathen. We have many missions at home, as well as abroad, and they want sufficient light to see and know of us, their spiritual helps, guides and counsellors.

Now, let me give a word or so, not in self-defence, but for truth's sake. An old pirate, who has plundered all his life, when compelled to walk the plank at last for his misdeeds, general turns around and charges his lawful captor with theft; so, in like manner, Communipaw, just as I have him at the very verge of the plank, and his fate staring him in the face, having nothing other left, charges me with plagiarism, theft, &c. Poor fellow, in his extremity, what better could he do; and I, like Topsy, when sharply charged by Miss Ophelia, "must 'fess"—indeed, I must some day write out for you the complete "confession of Ethiop." In that case, Barnum will have to try his hand over again; and if I mistake not, Parton will be compelled to remoddle [sic] his Horace Greeley. But I, like Topsy, "must 'fess," to a point or so—now, Ethiop should have marked his quotations, say Communipaw. Bold asserter, this Communipaw.—Oliver got him into hot water because of this, his predominant propensity. But to " 'fession." Confession first:

I never read Miss Bronte's Nillette; I never saw the book. Belonging, as I do, to the toiling masses, I have no back office with cushioned easy chairs, nor idle time for readings of that sort. While upon the subject of reading, might I not give my good friend Communipaw a gentle hint, to the effect that would it not be better for him to exhibit to the public a little less of his inordinate passion for fictitious reading—mere trash and verbiage—that leaves the mind no better than it finds it—on the contrary, vitiates it—I say, would it not be better for him to take this hint and prevent bad example? Confession second:

I grasp the few passing moments afforded me, when toil is over, to stay and strengthen the immortal that is within me, and seek the best mental food within my poor reach for it, generally leaving the cream and nectar for the last. Your Address, which was the ambrosia for the time, got spilt just as my anxious and fevered lips were about to receive it—and I never tasted a drop of it—or, in other words, it was snatched from my hand and forcibly taken from my possession, (your readers may guess by whom,) and I never read a sentence of it. In anger, then, and in sorrow, but in truth, now I confess this hoping, there is not another man, who is a man, that (unlike me) has not both read and pondered that Address, as I intend to do. Tell, my dear sir, Communipaw to hand me that copy of your Address, and allow me to subscribe myself.

Yours truly,

ETHIOPWilson, William Joseph ("Ethiop")

William Joseph Wilson (1818–?), a free black man from New Jersey, operated a bootmaking shop in New York City as early as the 1830s. In the 1840s he became a secondary school teacher and later a principal of a black school in Brooklyn. He was an activist on behalf of black education, encouraging access and attendance, and even opened his own library. Wilson also campaigned to secure the franchise for New York African Americans. He served as a member of the Committee of Thirteen, organized by New York black leaders to stop enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act. In the early 1850s Wilson’s letters appeared frequently in Frederick Douglass’ Paper, and Douglass referred to him as the newspaper’s “Brooklyn correspondent.” Wilson’s letters to the newspaper, published under the pseudonym “Ethiop,” were often part of an ongoing debate about the condition of blacks in New York and the United States. Wilson’s most frequent sparring partner in the war of letters was “Communipaw,” actually James McCune Smith, a prominent black physician in New York City. Carleton Mabee, Black Education in New York State: From Colonial to Modern Times (Syracuse, N.Y., 1979), 54, 63-67, 123, 129, 155, 158; Foner and Walker, Black State Conventions, 1:79-88; Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 87, 212, 229; Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, 4:144-45n. .

BROOKLYN HEIGHTS, Jan. 20, 1855.