FROM OUR SAN FRANCISCO CORRESPONDENT

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San Francisco, June 14, 1855.

DOUGLASS: SIR:—I have nothing of interest to communicate. We are enjoying a respite. The Legislature has adjourned today without "Othello's occupation gone,"Othello

and my imagination not being fertilem, I am a a loss what to write about. Oh! had I the pen of your New York Correspondent, "Communipaw,"Smith, 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. what an epistle I would endite. By the way, why does he not write oftener?

Business is improving. The miners are averaging fair wages. The affairs of Adams & Co. remain "in statu quo"

The fire department of Sacramento celebrated their fourth anniversary on the 2nd inst., by a grant parade, on which occasion "Groome's Brass Band" (colored) led the first division of the procession, an unusual circumstance, since the palmy days of Frank Johnson. Their appearance and performance elicited universal commendation.

Great preparations are being made for the celebration of the Fourth of July, our nations independence day, leaving out the black portion of it. Ungrateful people! you have forgotten that the colored people, in revolutionary days, rushed to the scene of conflict, and there poured out their life's blood as freely as the whites; they were equals then. Their ebony skin and disagreeable physical peculiarities were lost sight of amid the carnage of the battle-field; but the colored people are not thought of on the glorious Fourth, amid the pomp and circumstance of mimic warfare. When the nation's liberties are threatened by a foreign foe, they will be called upon, but I hope in vain.

We intend making an effort in behalf of , in this city, and in Sacramento, as soon as time will permit. The people are beginning to feel interested in its welfare, and we think a goodly number of subscribers can be obtained by proper exertion.

Occasionally, I get a glimpse of the —the old —and the sight does me good. The name of 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. will always be to me a name to be revered, respected and beloved; for I never can forget his devotion to, and his sacrifices for, the interest and elevation of the colored man in America. I live in hopes of one day grasping him by the hand and expressing the great admiration that his long and faithful services have inspired me with.

A large fire occurred in this city on the morning of the 12th inst., about 2 o'clock, destroying nearly a block of buildings. The inmates were principally "unfortunates" (women of ill repute.) It was distressing, as well as amusing, to see them flying from the pursuing flames.

The Democrats in Oregon have re-elected Lane, the present Congressional delegate from that territory.

The affairs of Page, Bacon, &Co., are as complicated as they well can be. Their creditors hold meetings every few days, at which long statements and longer speeches are made, all to the effect that the firm is abundantly able to meet all its liabilities, providing time is afforded them—after which resolutions are passed complimentary to the firm, and the meting adjourns to meet again in a few days, when the same farce is enacted; but this is characteristic of Americans. They glory in being humbugged. The country is filled with Barnums. A broken-down lawyer or politician has only to announce—in order to recruit his well nigh exhausted finances—that he will prove that the negroes formerly rejoiced in the possession of lengthy appendages, vulgarly termed tales, and he is sure to be greeted with a crowded house, and a majority of the audience will gulp down the with as much gusto as they would "ox tail soup."

The colored Masons of this city seem to outstrip their brethren in the Atlantic States, in the way of beautiful Lodge Rooms. The other day I visited the room occupied by Olive Branch Lodge No. 5, and was astonished at the magnificence of the furniture and ornaments.—The room is in the second story of a handsome brick building, situated on Stockton Street, (the most fashionable street in the city.) The front of the building is graced by a beautiful signboard on which is inscribed, "Masonic Hall." I shall not attempt a minute description, but venture to report that there is not a more magnificently furnished and tastefully decorated Lodge Room in the country. The other Lodge Room, in which meet Hannibal and Victoria Lodges, is a much larger room, and also beautifully furnished. It comprises the entire upper story of a large brick building on Broadway. These latter Lodges work under the jurisdiction of the National Grand Lodge.—The other (Olive Branch) under the United Grand Lodge of New York, of the merits of the respective organizations, I have no disposition to speak. It is an unfortunate circumstance that they do not fraternize.

Yours, &c.,

NUBIA.