BOSTON, June 4th, 1855.

F. DOUGLASS, ESQ.: DEAR SIR:—I perceive a mistake in the three last lines of my communication, which I refer to because they suppress a fact, which your correspondent especially designed to illustrate; it should read "There is no proof that Mr. Loring is such a commissioner, as described in the act of 1850."

The new Liquor Law is gradually getting into working order, there will be no trouble to execute it anywhere, except in Boston; this is the "Sebastopol;" but the combined efforts of the allied forces will ere long cause it to surrender. Most of the trials have resulted in convictions. Paran Stephens, the keeper of the Revere House, familiarly know as the "Kidnappers' Hotel" was convicted of illegal selling, and on Friday morning was fined ten dollars and costs and sentenced to twenty days in the House of Correction. He appealed, and gave bonds to persecute his appeal in the Municipal Court. He was very desirous to have the reporters suppress his case; but it was a "no go." It is here proper to remark, that the league" that we mentioned in our last communication, is in active operation, and the poorest are supplied with counsel and bail, to resist the law; so far, no one has been imprisoned or paid any fine. How long this will continue, time, alone will determine. The new law prohibits alcohol, brandy, and wine being put up by apothecaries in prescriptions. If there was any physician on the Committee that reported in favor of the bill, he must have been an Homeopath., and want the law to stand, though we think that the Doctors ought to be "privileged characters."

The city during the past week, has been alive with the Anniversary Meetings, which were well attended. the Anti-Slavery meetings as usual, were very interesting. Mr. Stephen S. Foster was the principal debater; he argued that the position held by Messrs. Sumner and Wilson are pro-slavery, and was very earnest in favor of a dissolution of the Union; these positions, which are not new, were supported by Messrs. FossFoss, Andrew Twombly

, 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. , Burleigh, 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 WrightWright, Henry Clarke

Abolitionist and pacifist Henry Clarke Wright (1797-1870) was one of Garrison's close associates. Reared in central New York, Wright served an apprenticeship as a hatmaker before studying at Andover Theological Seminary. In 1835 he joined the American Anti-Slavery Society and served as one of Theodore Dwight Weld's "seventy agents" until the executive board of the American Anti-Slavery Society removed him in 1837 because of his ultraist opinions. At about the same time he gave up his lecturing agency in the American Peace Society, which was also discomfited by his radicalism, and in 1838 helped found the New England Non-Resistance Society. Nonresistance, the foundation of Wright's reform philosophy, proclaimed the sovereignty of individual conscience and opposed all forms of coercion, violence, and the dominion of man over man. In theory Wright condoned violent resistance to slavery, though he personally eschewed violence. From 1842 to 1847 he traveled in Europe, lecturing on nonresistance and abolitionism. His avowal of antisabbatarian views in Scotland and his accusations (later retracted) that Free Churchmen were "drunkards" made Douglass chary of him. "Friend Wright has created against himself prejudices which I as an abolitionist do not feel myself called upon to withstand," Douglass wrote. Wright later turned to spiritualism and helped organize the Universal Peace Union in 1867. He died in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Douglass to Richard D. Webb, 10 November 1845, Anti-Slavery Collection, MB; Henry C. Wright to Douglass, 12 December 1846, in Lib., 29 January 1847; Henry C. Wright, Human Life: Illustrated in My Individual Experience as a Child, a Youth, and a Man (Boston, 1849); Peter Brock, Pacifism in the United Stales: From the Colonial Era to the First World War (Princeton, N.J., 1968), 516-18, 532-600, 926-27; Perry, Radical Abolitionism, 18-22, 60-61, 89-90, 159, 222-29, 234-38, 262, 278-82; ACAB, 6:623; NCAB, 2:232. . Mr. PierpontPierpont, John

John Pierpont (1785-1866) was a poet and an activist Unitarian minister of Boston’s Hollis Street Church from 1819 to 1845. Douglass quoted Pierpont’s work in many speeches and writings and published this poem, composed in 1839, in the first issue of the North Star. He misquoted a line from the “The Fugitive Slave’s Apostrophe to the North Star” in a lecture to the New Lyceum in Manchester, New Hampshire, on 24 January 1854. Pierpont also appeared with Douglass and many luminaries of the abolitionist movement at the well-publicized fourteenth anniversary meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society on 9 May 1848 at the Broadway Tabernacle in New York City. NS, 3 December 1847; New York Daily Tribune, 9 May 1848; NASS, 11 May 1848; John Pierpont, The Anti-Slavery Poems of John Pierpont (Boston, 1843), 29-33; DAB, 14:586-87. was the principal opponent, though he was supported by Rev. Theodore Parker and others. Mr. Pierpont is a Free Soiler and not in favor of a dissolution of the Union; he does not recognize any part of the Constitution as binding which commands men to do a wrong act, and believes that a man can honestly act under the Constitution, and at the same time occupy an Anti-Slavery position. Mr. Foster believes that to accept any office under the U.S. Constitution, is to become in the guilt and sin of slaveholding. Mr. Foster is an uncommonly shrewd and able debater, and takes the old stoic method of a king his opponent one question after another and the first thing he (the opponent) knows, he is floored. He has studied well the position that he now occupies, and defends it conscientiously and with a zeal seldom met with. Mr. Pierpont has more logic, and less enthusiasm; he takes up a subject and is as "cool as a cucumber," and as a logical debater must rank No 1. We heard Mr. Wendell Phillips for the third time, and we are to some extent able to give our opinion of him. Mr. Phillips and Mr. Sumner now enjoy the reputation of being the two greatest orators in New England. We consider them both great orators, though different in almost every respect. Mr. Sumner elaborates his speeches in his study, writes and rewrites them and then carefully commits them to memory. Mr. Phillips studies his speeches, but to a great extent speaks off hand, he has accustomed himself so much to extemporaneous speaking, that if he should be called up out of "a sweet sleep," he could make a speech; in such an event Mr. Sumner would ask for time. Mr. Phillips' temperament is sanguine—Mr. Sumner's is billious; hence the difference in the character of their motives and productions. Mr. Phillips' voice is euphonious, though not powerful; he speaks easy and earnestly; his gestures are a little stiff; his arguments go into you like a blaze in a pile of shavings, and their tendency is to destroy every bold and sonorous, though too monotonous; his gestures are free and dramatic; his style is easy and grand; his arguments come like a tempest, overpowering and bearing down every opposing element. The difference is, Mr. Phillips' fire is aimed to destroy an evil; and Mr. Sum-

ner's tempest is to bear down, overpower, and put it "on its back."

But let us return to the meetings. We saw Sojourner Truth there; she made several ineffectual attempts to speak, but while we were there she did not get an opportunity. We were anxious to hear her, more, however, from curiosity than anything else, for it is the first time we have had the pleasure of "laying our eyes on her," and we had a "woman's curiosity" to hear what she had to say, as we have so often heard that she has such a store of "mother wit."—She certainly did very well with her book, for the abolitionists bought it like fun, and that is the application of the anti-slavery doctrine that we need so much; let us have the pecuniary encouragement in which we show ourselves competent.

A proposition was expected to come up during the session of the Convention to make a collection to assist Anthony Burns in getting his education at the Oberlin College, it being the understanding that Mr. B. is to study for the ministry, and is to take charge of a colored church. This Mr. Charles L. Remond objected to, as he did colored churches generally, for he thought "it was encouraging the negro pew on a large scale." Mr. Foster objected to that institution, as the religion taught there was such as would permit Anthony Burns, or any other fugitive, being returned into slavery. No collection was made.

The Convention, on the whole, was highly successful. Rev. Theodore Parker made the closing speech and in it referred to Mayor Smith. He said—"Years ago this ragged New Hampshire boy came to Boston, took lodgings in an attic, and the bill for his lodgings made such a depression in his financial affairs, that he deemed it prudent to go without his breakfast. He has now accumulated considerable property, and this once ragged and penniless New Hampshire boy is now Mayor of the city of Boston." Quite a leap, Mr. Editor; he should not have forgotten, in his greediness to send back a poor fugitive into the hell of slavery, that he came himself from the dregs of poverty, and how cruel it would be to force him back into his attic, to go without breakfast, and to clothe him again with rags. He is like the male, and forgets what he sprang from.

The Virginia election has knocked the Know Nothings "into pi" in that State, and has made a "mighty rattling among the dry bones" in this. The prospects of the nationalization of the party become less and less every day; they "grow down like a cow's tail;" and the Convention which is to be held in Philadelphia tomorrow will not add much to it. We expect to hear of a tornado; let us have it. We are at the end of the wires and shall get the details, and may hear something which may escape you; if it comes to us so that we can give it to our readers, we shall do so—if not, you must do as we do, get it the best you can. We hope that the National Convention . New York City or Albany would be much better; but Boston is the proper place to have it; we believe it would do more good here than anywhere else, and we hope the Committee will pause and reflect before they call the Convention in Philadelphia.

S.