MR. EDITOR :—I have just arrived home in time to read the manuscript of your editorial for this week's issue, under the caption, "Letters of Messrs. Watkins and Myers." As I shall leave home again in a day or two, I beg the privilege of a parting word with you.

I regret that you did not see fit to conduct this controversy without following in the wake of the mendacious slanderers who barked at my heels last fall. This, however, reveals the desperate extremity to which you are driven.—Whether or not I was " " last fall, or whether or not "Stephen's so deceivin', the devil won't believe him;" you have utterly failed to sustain your position, or refute that which I have assumed. The brilliant coruscations of your wit are not calculated to throw any light upon the subject under consideration. You can crack a very excellent joke, I know. So can Dan Rice. I have no time for jokes, nor taste for negro minstrelsy. My mission is too exalted. I cannot, therefore, for the purpose of exciting a broad grin, condescend to play with the " well-dressed" and "well-gilded" "wooden images" of a corrupt and mistaken fancy.

You still manage to keep it before the people, that I denounced the Republican party in 1857. "Still harping on my daughter!" Well; what if I did? " One with half an eye, can see that 1859 1857. You denounced them also; but did you not petition the present Legislature (Republican

—"a head without a heart—d'ye mind that) for aid for "The Colored Home"—a very worthy Institution of your city? I had the pleasure of hearing in the Assembly Chamber a few days ago, a petition to that effect, said to be written by your own hand. At any rate, you are one of the moving spirits in the affair. Now, if there is any force in your logic, you have no business to appeal to our Republican Legislature in 1859 for aid to "," or for anything else, because you denounced its leaders in 1857!! Very shallow reasoning that, Mr. Editor, and no one knows it better than yourself. You are in a vise, sir. Get out if you can.

You speak of my parading "the opinion which Frederick Douglass held of the Republican party in 1856, and which 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. held of the same, early in 1857."—But you raise a false issue when you allude to my introducing these opinions to impeach my own testimony. I quoted these gentlemen's opinions of the Republican party, as an offset to assertions relative to said party, as contradistinguished from the Democratic. I regarded their opinions as equally weighty with your own, and hence their introduction.

But, Mr. Editor, you make quite a mistake when you remark that "Mr. Garrison's opinion ante-dates Mr. Watkins' denunciation of the Republican party." You allude to it as given in "the early part of 1957," when, in fact, the speech from which I quote Mr. Garrison's estimate of the Republican party, was made on the evening of Jan. 27th, '59, and published in the on the 4th of last month. This startles you, probably, but so it is, and so you will find it.

You are very much "pained" about the silence of Messrs. Watkins and Myers on one point. And that point you state as follows: "They do not say that they any from the Republican party, nor its leaders, in

regard to the Suffrage question last Novem
ber."

As you did all in your power to defeat that party in the fall of '58, and as we are now pushing forward the Equal Suffrage Movement without your co-operation, I respectfully submit that whether we had any "" or not, is a secret of which you shall be kept profoundly ignorant, because you have nothing to do with it—nothing to do, either with "," or with "." We know what we are about. Mark that! All that we ask, is, that should we be successful, that you and those who adhere to your present suicidal policy, will keep in their proper sphere, and not arrogate unto yourselves a position you do not deserve. This is plain language, Sir. I feel strongly on this subject. I am tired of nonsense—tired of running after intangible abstractions—tired of chasing and catching pretty theories—tired of standing by guns which may not be till the millennium—tired, Mr. Editor, completely tired. Give me that policy which achieves or seeks to achieve practical results, practical results. To the wins with your beautiful theories, unless you can put life and action in them. I believe the Republican party to be the only political party in the Union which can do anything towards securing our political Rights, no matter what may be the faults of its leaders. With Mr. Garrison, "my hope is in that party;" in the expansion and development of its principles. There is room for expansion. It is but a child of 3 or 4 years' growth. It take higher grounds, because it cannot help it.—There is but one other living political party to oppose it. With one or the other I must array myself, if I am connected with a politcal party at all. I cannot act with the sham Democracy. I cannot act in a direction which will give it aid and comfort. I don't like to see Democrats peddling Gerrit SmithSmith, Gerrit

Gerrit Smith (1797– 1874), a New York businessman and land speculator, became best known for his philanthropic work for such reform causes as temperance and abolition. Between 1828 and 1835, he donated large sums of money to the American Colonization Society, but abandoned that movement in 1835 when his sympathies shifted to the immediate abolitionists. In the 1840s, he gave approximately 140,000 acres of land in upstate New York to three thousand black settlers, thus qualifying them to vote. Smith was a founder and frequent candidate of the Liberty party, running for governor of New York on that ticket in 1840 and winning a seat in Congress in 1852. When the Free Soil merger with moderate antislavery Democrats and Whigs lured away many Liberty party supporters, Smith helped bankroll that organization until 1860. Smith befriended Douglass when the latter moved to Rochester, and Smith frequently helped finance Frederick Douglass’ Paper. Like Douglass, Smith supported John Brown, but psychological stress caused by the failure at Harpers Ferry brought on the first of a series of bipolar episodes that greatly reduced his subsequent reform activities. Ralph Volney Harlow, Gerrit Smith: Philanthropist and Reformer (1939; New York, 1972); Gerald Sorin, The New York Abolitionists: A Case Study of Political Radicalism (Westport, Conn., 1971), 269– 87; Lewis Perry, Radical Abolitionism: Anarchy and the Government of God in Antislavery Thought (Ithaca, N.Y., 1973), 170– 80; John R. McKivigan and Madeleine Leveille, “The ‘Black Dream’ of Gerrit Smith, New York Abolitionist,” Syracuse University Library Associates Courier, 20:61– 76 (Fall 1985); NCAB , 2:322– 23; DAB, 17:270– 71. votes on

election day as they did in this city last November. It don't look well. I shall, then, act with the Republican party, even though I should be guilty of the heinous crime of receiving a "Republican eagle," now and then, from those who are of the opinion that free passes over railroads are not ordinarily granted to the writer, and that hotels are not conducted upon the gospel principle, "."

Adieu, Mr. Editor, till the next Presidential election, when, God willing, "," or no "," I shall try and be found acting where I can be of some service in knocking down and dragging out the enemy. You will doubtless, be found blowing the bellows for "," as you were last fall. Very well. Stand by your guns; you can make a noise even though you do no execution. Let us not, however, in the meantime, forget the salutary advice of one of old—"Let there be no strife between us, I pray thee, FOR WE BE BRETHREN."

WM. JAMES WATKINS.

ROCHESTER, March 9th, '59