FROM OUR NEW YORK CORRESPONDENT.

NEW YORK, Aug. 4, 1855.

MR. EDITOR:—Although it is not the most pleasant employment to while the thermometer ranges in the nineties, yet, by your permission, I will examine other objections of the to the

INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL FOR COLORED PEOPLE.

3. "Such an institution would be too remote from the masses of our people to have the beneficial effect proposed. To thousands of them it must remain a think unknown. * * * None but the most enterprising or those able to bear the expense of travel and absence from home, will be able to avail themselves of the advantage of the college," says Mr. Clark.—The first difficulty is easily overcome: the census tells us exactly where, and in what numbers the colored people dwell: they number in the free States, less than 150,000: of whom 125,000 live in the adjacent States of New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio: these masses can be easily reached through , the the and the : there would be no trouble in scattering circulars repeatedly, stating to all of them the whereabouts and the what-abouts of the Industrial School. If only "the most enterprising" should present themselves for admission, they are just the people needed: and I may add almost the only class wanted. If there be one want, above all others which we need just now, it is the WANT OF ELBOWS. The lads who should start out, with a change of linen and stout hearts and who would trudge one hundred miles on foot, and present themselves for admission to the School, would be sure for the good cause.

4. "How many mechanics do the projectors of the College expect to send forth into the country each year. Will there be enough to affect in any degree the sentiment against the employment of colored mechanics?" says Mr. Clark?

It is not so much as , that we aim at, in the Industrial School: not the but the of graduates. Our people are overwhelmed with pretenders—pretenders whose short-comings the mass of us do not see—for we are ignorant—but on whom the intelligent among the whites have set the brand, now become proverbial!—"very good for a black man:" which means, "very good for a class who cannot be expected to be thorough." The very words we have just copied, exactly as they are printed in the , are open to this criticism: each sentence pointed with a period instead of a note of interrogation.

No! it is not the members, it is the quality of the young men, who may be sent forth from the Industrial School, who will test its usefulness. West Point sends forth, I believe, less than fifty graduates each year: yet the American Army is the best officered in the world: these cadets go forth skilled in every minutiae of building forts, or cities, or railroads, or bridges; of conquering nature in her every aspect: throw them down anywhere on the face of the globe, with the smallest possible resources, and they will get along better than any like member of young men; place them in the midst of a people however rude, and they will best understand how to organize and elevate them; considered in the relation of their efficiency, no cost would be dear in preparing such men for the advancement of their fellow-men, if only PEACE and not WAR lay at the ground work of their education.

Our School would be cheap indeed in cost, if at the end of ten years, and the expense of a hundred thousand dollars, it should send forth a George Law, or Edward Stevens, or, as I firmly believe our exuberance of talent will produce, the superiors of both. The success of such men consists in their ability to work at once with head and hand: and it is this kind of education we seek to give our youth.

"," is a saying that crushes us with a weight heavier than slavery, or caste, or reluctant boss mechanics could ever inflict; we sit idle, enchanted, by these bitter words: let a dozen or two thorough mechanics, go forth and break this enchantment and stand forth as men of enterprize, pith, re- sources and skilled in mechanics—and there is no barrier of caste which they will not break down, no apathy on the part of their brethren which they will not kindle into emulous flame.

5. "In conclusion—if any thing was wanting to show the utter unsoundness of the plan proposed by the Committee on Industrial Colleges, their want of careful consideration, shown by their puerile estimates, would furnish it: * * * the estimate of the Committee is thirty thousand dollars. * * * Talk of thirty thousand dollars! five hundred thousand would not be a cent too much, to purchase a suitable location, erect recitation rooms, chapels, dormitories, workshops, to purchase tools and machinery, to endow the various professorships, or masterships necessary to place such an enterprise in successful operation." Brother Clark would never do to compete for a job to be given to the lowest bidder: he must have taken a peep thro' Mitchell's telescope just before inditing that last objection.

We submit, in reply, that the estimate of the Committee was the result of a careful series of estimates made out by Mr. SULLY, a gentleman of unrivalled experience in such labor: he is the intimate friend and co-laborer of MAURICE and KINGSLEY and men of that stamp who have established Working Men's Associations and Working Men's Colleges in England. If Mr. Clark will turn to the last number of the North American Review he will find some hints of what their institutions are. Mr. Sully was present and addressed at some length the meeting of the National Council held in New York in November, 1853: I may add that the Industrial School we contemplate, and the Industrial College, pictured by Mr. Clark, are two very different things. We do not intend to establish any fat, lazy professorships, nor encourage the attendance of dressing droning students; we intend that every man and woman, shall, whether teacher or student, what they . That thirty thousand dollars would start such an Institution, there is no reason to doubt. It would probably succeed better if never endowed: it had better earn its own continued existence.—It is the enormous endowment of the Smithsonian Institution that has emasculated the mind of Professor Henry: it is the enormous endowment of Columbia College in our city of New York which keeps old grannies at its head, and drags it in the farthest water of intellectual advancement: it is the enormous endowment of the Scientific School at Cambridge which blears the science of Agassiz into a rotten assent to the meanest of reasons for American caste.—And, if I am not mis-informed, it was seeking after endowment, or an endeavor to increase its means, that is, the ease and certainty of emolument to its literary professorships that diverted Oberlin from becoming a Manual Labor School. If the same time and business talent which have been devoted to the endowment of lettered Oberlin had been as skilfully and zealously devoted to developing hand culture in that Institution, then there would have been no need that these lines should be penned. I am told by those who know, that the style in appearance and living is such as to place this institution at Oberlin, entirely beyond the means of one in moderate circumstances.

There is one other objection made by the
, which must be left to
another time. There was a great time around
New York on the

FIRST OF AUGUST.

About three or , says one of the papers, two-thirds colored persons, were attracted to Morris Grove on Long Island, to hear Judge Culver, 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. and others; about , says the same paper, assembled at Clifton Park, Staten Island, to celebrate, the first of August, and have a good time generally; Stephen Myers and Joseph W. Smith were the speakers; you will find their very good addresses in the N. Y. of August 2nd. The , partly owned by brother Oliver Johnson, has not found room even to announce this largest gathering of colored people that ever took place on the American Continent. Hope you had a fine time at New Bedford.

Yours,

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. .