FROM OUR PROVIDENCE CORRESPONDENT

FREDERICK DOUGLASS, ESQ.:—The insertion in your paper of the accompanying communications will subserve justice and truth. It did not occur to me that there would be a necessity for troubling you with the one which I sent to the Liberator; yet, I supposed that you might copy it, as a matter of public interest: but the Liberator having refused to insert it, I must beg you to do so. The communication (as a perusal of the same will show) is no matter of "self-defence." I am not aware of any thing that could appear to my "disadvantage" in the Liberator; I have not laid "claim to be heard" in that paper upon any such supposition; but my communication was sent to that paper, because it pretended to give an account of the Convention to which my communication alluded, and because Wm. 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. says, "In the columns of the Liberator both sides of every question are impartially allowed a hearing."

What was my "course"? What did I do or say at this Convention? I know that Mr. Garrison expressed his "opinion" as to my remarks—which opinion was made up—the result of whispering in his ear, the supposition that I had more sympathy with other anti-slavery views than with his; that I was allied with the late Standard controversy, which has excited his choler. I did nothing, save assist the Convention with a subscription; I said the substance of the matter contained in my communication to the Liberator set down as being said by "a speaker." I further suggested, that there should be no fee for admission to an evening session, as there had been no notice to that effect. Mrs. Foster suggested that the admission fee should be ten cents; it would keep out the rowdies who might come to disturb the meeting—when some one suggested, that as no notice had been given of a charge, some might come without money—when Mrs. Foster said, that if any presented themselves and pled poverty, let them be admitted—to which I replied, that the rowdies, those who would disturb a meeting, would not scruple to use this as a means to obtain admission fee, and the end desired would not be obtained. I also corrected a statement of one of the speakers, who said that Rhode Island was free from all proscriptive laws. Thus I have offended no one.—Why conceal a portion of the doings of a Convention? Why attempt to suppress the matter when presented in an honest and impartial communication by refusing to give the same?

GEO. T. DOWNING.

PROVIDENCE, Feb. 14th, 1855.

(Copy.)

BOSTON, Feb. 12, 1855

MR. GEORGE T. DOWNING—I decline inserting your communication in the Liberator, for various reasons, and therefore return it to you. My opinion of your course at the late Anti-Slavery Convention in Providence, nd of the spirit with which you were animated on that occasion, was then and there very frankly expressed. I have nothing more to add, except that, as nothing whatever has appeared in the Liberator to your disadvantage, you can rightfully make no claim to be heard, through its columns, in self-defence. Had any thing been published against you of a personal nature, the case would be entirely different.

(Signed,) Wm. Lloyd Garrison.

To the Editor of the Liberator:

We shall have added to our already almost insufferable burden of oppression and wrong of slavery and deregulation, a still more galling subjection, if we are not allowed to examine and question those calling themselves our friends—if, seeing inconsistency, we must remain dumb, for fear of the braying of some who may discern nothing but "jealousy" in an honest expression on the part of the proscribed, because the brayers regard any such expression as resulting from what they conceive "the bane of the race," (vide the Weslayan.)—if we are to keep a padlock upon our spirits, our mouths, least, by speaking, those of "the superior race," or some of the believed to be friends, should charge us with possessing a "querulous spirit." (See Liberator Jan. 26.) In the face of all the above, it is my resolve to speak, and that boldly, whenever, in my opinion, the case demands.

The term, a member of an Anti-Slavery Society, is generally received as representing one who not only preaches for the abolition of slavery in South Carolina, Virginia and Georgia, but who alike advocates the abrogation of all proscriptive laws and customs, which tend to oppress and degrade the black man; and it is rank "Infidelity," as now defined by Wm. Lloyd Garrison, for one bearing the above cognoman to proscribe a colored man for convenience, interest, or in obeyance to public sentiment.—Judging by this standard, I think that the charge of infidelity may be brought to your very doors.

It would have been a practical application of the motto, "Without concealment—without compromise," for the Liberator to have given the following a portion of the doings of a Convention of the American A. S. Society in the State of Rhode Island, along with other doings of the same, which it has faithfully heralded, and which occurred in January, 1855.

During the afternoon session of the second day of the Convention, a person arose and advocated one of the resolutions before the Convention, affirming that a field of anti-slavery effort is at the North, and in maintenance of the position, cited the prejudice and proscription leveled by Church and State against the nominally free of the North, as a matter to be battled against—which statements elicited the approving countenance of Mr. Garrison. The speaker proceeded in his arguments by giving a fact which bore upon one of the household—one who had presided over the deliberations of the Convention that very day. He stated that Mr. Asa FairbanksFairbanks, Asa

Asa Fairbanks (1795-1876) was active in Rhode Island and national reform circles. He served as a vice president for the American Anti-Slavery Society from 1846 to 1864 and as a delegate to the national Free Democrat convention held in Pittsburgh in 1852. In 1853 he represented Rhode Island at the Whole World's Temperance Convention held in New York City. Fairbanks drew criticism from some in abolitionist circles when he refused to allow African American abolitionists to speak at a meeting held in Providence in January 1855. Washington (D.C.) National Era, 5 August 1852; FDP, 27 May 1852, 9 September 1853, 19 May 1854, 23 February, 2 March 1855. His wife, Anna Fairbanks (1797-1870), was a hardworking abolitionist organizer in the city. Both were agents for the Underground Railroad. American Anti-Slavery Society, Platform of the American Anti-Slavery Society and Its Auxiliaries (New York, 1855), 6; idem, Platform of the American Anti-Slavery Society and Its Auxiliaries (New York, 1860), 6; Lorenzo Sayles Fairbanks, Genealogy of the Fairbanks Family in America, 1633-1897 (Boston, 1897), 491; Van Broekhoven, Devotion of These Women, 174. was the sole proprietor of a course of Lectures in the city of Providence; that among the lecturers were Wm. 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. , Theodore ParkerParker, Theodore

Theodore Parker (1810-60), Harvard-educated Unitarian clergyman and reformer, was among the most erudite of all New England transcendentalists. Born in Lexington, Massachusetts, he taught at Boston-area private schools from 1831 until 1842 and graduated from Harvard Divinity School in 1836. After his ordination in 1837, Parker preached mainly at his West Roxbury church until 1845, when he resigned and accepted the pastorate of the new Twenty- Eighth Congregational Society of Boston. There he attracted a large, socially diverse and racially integrated following. The author of numerous tracts, sermons, and published addresses, he also edited the Massachusetts Quarterly Review throughout its three-year existence. Although he criticized some Garrisonian positions, Parker joined in the antislavery cause after 1845, attacking slavery on moral and economic grounds but basing his most militant abolitionism on the belief that black emancipation would prepare the way for further Anglo-Saxon dominance. As a member of the Boston Vigilance Committee he gave frequent aid to escaped bondsmen, actively resisted the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, and was indicted for his role in the Anthony Burns case. An outspoken proponent of the admission of Kansas as a free state, Parker hosted a meeting in 1858 at which John Brown disclosed his plans for a raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Parker was among the "Secret Six" who supported John Brown's raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859. Suffering from declining health, Parker traveled to the Caribbean and then Europe, where he hoped to improve his condition. Instead he died of tuberculosis in Florence, Italy, on 10 May 1860, where he was buried. Renehan, Secret Six, 37-46; Henry Steele Commager, Theodore Parker (Boston, 1960); C. Peter Ripley, ed., The Black Abolitionist Papers, 5 vols. (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1985- 92), 4:52; Fredrickson, Black Image in the White Mind, 119-21, 157-58; ACAB, 4:654-56; DAB, 14:38-41; ANB, 17:43-44. , Lucy StoneStone, Lucy

Lucy Stone (1818-93) was emerging as one of the leading abolitionist and feminist orators of the day. Born in West Brookfield, Massachusetts, she was the daughter of Francis Stone, a wealthy farmer, and Hannah Matthews Stone. At sixteen, when her father refused to finance her college education, primarily because she was a woman, Lucy decided to teach in the local school and save money. For brief periods she attended Quaboag Seminary in Warren, Massachusetts, the Wesleyan Academy in Wilbraham, Massachusetts, and Oberlin College, from which she was graduated in 1847. That same year Stone gave her first public address on women's rights from the pulpit of her brother, William Bowman Stone, at Gardner, Massachusetts, and in 1848 she began to lecture regularly for the American Anti-Slavery Society. In 1850 she was instrumental in launching the annual National Woman's Rights Conference, first held at Worcester, Massachusetts, and she helped pay for the publication of its proceedings. In May 1855 she married fellow reformer Henry Blackwell but continued to use her family name. In the 1860s Stone was one of the founders of the New England Woman Rights Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association. In 1870 she raised money for the founding of the Woman's Journal, and in 1872 she and her husband became its coeditors. Stanton, History of Woman Suffrage, 1:260-62; Alice Stone Blackwell, Lucy Stone: Pioneer of Women's Rights (Norwood, Mass., 1930); ACAB, 5:702-03; NCAB, 29:128; DAB, 17:80-81; NAW, 3:387-90. , Wendell PhillipsPhillips, Wendell

Boston-born and Harvard-educated Wendell Phillips (1811-84) ranked second only to Garrison in influence in the American Anti-Slavery Society in the 1840s and 1850s. Bored with the legal profession and influenced by his antislavery fiancee, Ann Terry Greene, Phillips dedicated himself to abolitionism beginning in 1837. A highly gifted orator, Phillips was in demand as a lecturer even in nonabolitionist circles. Besides abolition, Phillips championed woman suffrage, prohibition, penal reform, Indian rights, and legislative protection for workers. When Garrison retired from the presidency of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1865, Phillips assumed the post and led abolitionists until passage of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870. James Brewer Stewart, Wendell Phillips: Liberty's Hero (Baton Rouge, La., 1986); Irving H. Bartlett, Wendell Phillips: Brahmin Radical (Boston, 1961); DAB, 14:546-47. , and others, that Mr. Fairbanks had been spoken to, in reference to employing, among his lecturers, some of the able lecturers of the proscribed class, (the list of lecturers not being complete,) to which he responded, that it would "hurt the course to have a 'colored' man among the lecturers!" Just as the speaker had proceeded thus far in his remarks, Wm. Lloyd Garrison arose from his seat, and unceremoniously, without leave, interrupted the speaker by speaking aloud to Mr. Fairbanks, who, it seems, was engaged in an interesting tete a tetewith some ladies, and said, "Mr. Fairbanks, are you aware of the incredible statement being made affecting your anti-slavery integrity?" and then recapitulated the statement made by the speaker, affecting said Mr. Fairbanks, and called upon him to speak. The person entitled to the floor who, from deference, had allowed Mr. Garrison to interrupt him in a manner which no gentleman should have done, objected to Mr. Fairbanks, or any one else, occupying the floor, until he had yielded his right to the same—when he hoped that Mr. Fairbanks would make the matter right—it being a matter that affected his "anti-slavery integity"—that he had refrained from making the statement until his author and the party implicated were present; and further, that there was another incident connected with Mr. Fairbanks' course of lectures, to which he would make reference—which incident received much importance from the above statement, inasmuch

as it evidently had its emanation in the [illegible] governing the first case. He then stated that he had purchased four tickets to attend on of the lectures, and attended with three other colored friends; that Mr. Fairbanks followed him and friends to the door, and directed him "to seats on the side in the corner"—an interest which he did not manifest to any of the many who went in about the same time before and after this [illegible] act, as the speaker was particular in observing. He was directed to those seats "on the side in the corner," notwithstanding there was an abundance of seats unoccupied in the centre aisle as desirable, and more desirable than the seats selected by the proprietor of the course. The speaker on taking his seat, called upon Mr. S. W. Wheeler, a member of the Convention, and who had been a member of the American A. S. Society for a number of years, to verify the above statemenetes, if correct. So far as they implicated Mr. Fairbanks, in refusing to employ "colored" lecturers, it would hurt his course of lectures to have them among the lecturers, Mr. Wheeler —nor did Mr. Fairbanks deny the charge.

The above is suprising in an anti-slavery man—in one who could preside over a Convention while it denounced on the right hand and on the left those who bowed to the expediency and interest. But my marvellous [illegible] reach its utmost height, when William Lloyd Garrison, after his above declaration declaring the statement to be "incredible and affecting Mr. Fairbanks' anti-slavery integrity," not only refrained from denouncing the act, but actually goes on to palliate the same, in behalf of the party who stood convicted of the charge, by introducing a subtertfuge, as he did, in raising the point that it was inconsistent for the speaker to wish not to be regarded as a "colored" man, and at the same time to object because "colored" men are not invited to lectures. Mr. Garrison knew that the issue was not the exclusion of "colored men" as such, but the exclusion of the worth and character in the class, because it is popular so to do. There may be a hundred good reasons why "a colored" lecturere may not be invited to lecture; but is the reason given a justifiable one—the fear of popular sentiment?

Mr. S. S. Foster justified Mr. Fairbanks. He said he would do likewise; that it was a great responsibility to get up a course of lectures; that a previous course had cost the proprietor , &c. Mr. Garrison after getting off one of his forcible expressions, saying that he had learnt that the possession of black skin was not to be taken as evidence of its possessor being an anti-slavery man; that a man might be as black as ten thousand midnights concentrated and be no abolitionist:—(I must confess that I did not see the force of the expression in its bearing upon the matter under consideration)—he said. Why had not Wm. Wells Brown objected to his not having been invited to lecture? when the speaker stated that he had informed Mr. Brown of the facts—when he (Mr. Brown) said that it was the speaker's duty to bring the matter before the Convention.

I suppose that I will be charged with being affected with "the bane of the race," of fostering "a querulous and morbid spirit," for making the above truthful statements; that I will call upon me the anathemas of the giants, as well as the pigmy grunts of those more intimately associated with, and affected by the above statements. But, will this alter truth?

GEO. T. DOWNINGDowning, George T.

George T. Downing (1819-1903) was the eldest son of Thomas Downing, a well-known black restaurateur in New York City. After an education at the city's segregated Mulberry Street School and at Hamilton College, he worked in his father's business until 1855, when he opened a hotel in Newport, Rhode Island. Downing was active in the Underground Railroad and led a successful effort to integrate Rhode Island public schools. He supported Douglass in the public controversy with Henry H. Garnet over the merits of the latter's African Civilization Society. In 1859 Downing presided over a convention of New England blacks that gave a qualified endorsement to the Republican party. During the Civil War, Downing moved to Washington, D.C., and became manager of the House of Representatives' restaurant. In February 1866 Downing was the chairman of a committee of blacks,including Douglass, who attended an interview with President Andrew Johnson during which the chief executive urged his audience to abandon their advocacy of black suffrage. Lib., 20 July 1855; New York Weekly Anglo-African, 19 September 1859, 21 April 1860; NASS, 24 February 1866; Cleveland Gazette, 12 September 1885; New York Times, 22 July 1903; Simmons, Men of Mark, 1003-06; Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 145, 150, 190, 218-19; McPherson, Struggle for Equality, 343-46; Guichard Parris, "George T. Downing," NHB, 5:42 (November 1941); Freeman, "The Free Negro in New York City," 46, 49-56; DANB, 187-88.

Providence, Feb. 3, 1855