FROM OUR NEW YORK CORRESPONDENT.

MR. EDITOR:—Passing along Canal St. to
day, I dropped in at E. V. Clark's, our jeweller,
and before I left, we had traded pens; he get
ting decidedly the better of the bargain, for that
old stump of Gold which has written so many
Communipaws, is his, and this new pen hand
some, well made, fluent, is all that I get in re
turn: I think the diamond point of the old
pen has been pretty well worn down, and the
solid stump which has been the means of many
communications between us, is remorselessly
set down in his ledger, "old gold 31 1/4 cents!"—There
is no telling now what will become of
that dear old pen: whether a new diamond
point will be ground on it, and it will be digni
fied with a new and golden handle: or whether
it will "go to pot" with other gold and mix
its ultimate particles with what will be changed
into a beautiful finger ring, or may be a lady's
ear drop, or infant's bracelet clasp, or a flaming
breast-pin! Whatever be its fate, may good
betide the dear old stump! How cam I to
part with it? Clark must have magnetized me,
for had I been cool and unimpressed, all the
pens in his extensive could not have
coaxed it away from me. It has done me bet
ter service than ever did trusty sword do Knight
of old. It pecked Ethiop'sWilson, William Joseph ("Ethiop")

William Joseph Wilson (1818–?), a free black man from New Jersey, operated a bootmaking shop in New York City as early as the 1830s. In the 1840s he became a secondary school teacher and later a principal of a black school in Brooklyn. He was an activist on behalf of black education, encouraging access and attendance, and even opened his own library. Wilson also campaigned to secure the franchise for New York African Americans. He served as a member of the Committee of Thirteen, organized by New York black leaders to stop enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act. In the early 1850s Wilson’s letters appeared frequently in Frederick Douglass’ Paper, and Douglass referred to him as the newspaper’s “Brooklyn correspondent.” Wilson’s letters to the newspaper, published under the pseudonym “Ethiop,” were often part of an ongoing debate about the condition of blacks in New York and the United States. Wilson’s most frequent sparring partner in the war of letters was “Communipaw,” actually James McCune Smith, a prominent black physician in New York City. Carleton Mabee, Black Education in New York State: From Colonial to Modern Times (Syracuse, N.Y., 1979), 54, 63-67, 123, 129, 155, 158; Foner and Walker, Black State Conventions, 1:79-88; Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 87, 212, 229; Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, 4:144-45n. eyes out: it tick
led brother Oliver Johnson as he was never tick
led before, and made a better man of him:

"Prometheus-like from Heaven stole"

the irate thunder from William Loyd 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. :
it waked up to an agony of excitement "A
Republican" who dwells in Auburn: (I have nev
er been able to learn on which side of the august
stone walls which adorn that village:) and—but
why need I go over the old, when this new
pen is up for—a market!

I have a strange pleasure in looking at grave
yards recently: did you ever see a Friend's
burying ground? It never occurred to me that
Quakers ever died, until a year or two ago,
when I saw the neatest of hearses passing, rath
er gliding, noiselessly thro' Broadway: I knew
at once that it could be none other than the
Friends' hearse. When next you visit New
York, pass up the Bower to Houston street,
turn East, and a few steps will bring you to a
plain tall iron railing enclosing three quarters of
an acre of knotted green sward: on the right
is a marble manufactory filled with inchoate
monuments of every possible variety: and the
eternal saw—saw—of this factory must disturb
the rest of the Friends in the adjoining enclos
ure, which contains neither slab nor head-stone,
to mark where repose the ashes of some of the
noblest men whom New York has yet produced!
At first I loved the stern simplicity of this
Friends' grave yard: it said audibly,

"dust to dust!"

it breathed the silence of the grave: and al
most made me wish to smooth down those frequent

hillocks, that the even earth might no be
tray that men and women slumbered beneath
its surface: how calmly thought could flow
forevermore, over such a smooth shaven lawn!
Rest would seem actual and perfect! It was,
then, with the fact that they suffered even hil
locks of turf to mark the irregular graves, that
my dissatisfaction with the Friends' grave yard
began.

In Africa, they manage differently in these
matters: an Egyptian King of the primeval
time, began his reign and his tomb simultane
ously: a mere cod-fish aristocracy are Theodore
Parker's Anglo-Saxon race in the comparison
with them. He calls the Anglo-Saxons "exclu
sive!" Exclusive forsooth! Why that glori
ous old Asychis with at least one third of negro
blood in his veins, built for this exclusive use
of his mortal remains, a pyramid to keep them
from the profanation of vulgar, that is all hu
man eyes—a pyramid which cost more than a
hundred modern fortunes, a pyramid which se
cured, for thousands of years, the
rest he sought, and which covered a larger sur
face of the earth than higglety-pigglety Anglo
Saxons would require to bury twenty thousand
of themselves in neck and heels with all, of
whatever [clime?] or race, who can afford the pur
chase of a share of a grave with them! A
pyramid for one man, yet large enough to con
tain St. Paul's and Westminster and all the
Mausoleums to England's great departed!

Well! that gorgeous pyramid in Egypt, and
this Friends' burial ground in Houston Street,
mark very distinct traits of human character,
very great contrariety of human thought: our
Egyptian monarch would ever he , leaving
his Titan mark on the earth's bosom, to be seen
in the coming years, while nature exists; our
Quaker friends, after a full enjoyment, physical
and intellectual of the , close their books
with it; render to the earth its own, and open
a new account with hereafter: with this world,
They have nothing more to do: they shut the
pan upon it: and they enter upon the next,
with a clear ledger: thus talks their grave
yard, at least, to me.

After all, both our pyramidal, and Friends'
mode of burial are of the "earth earthly."—There
is no imagination, no faith demonstrated
in either: how infinitely more eloquent, more
harmonizing, more elevating to the thoughts of
the passers by are these few words, on a brown
stone slab in St. Paul's Church yard, Broadway

"D— N—"

"An affectionate wife, a tender parent, and an
humble follower of the BLESSED JESUS, in a full
persuasion of whose prevailing merits she resign
ed her spirit

To GOD."

Even more touching is the inscription on the
adjoining headstone of the same modest outline:
it tells of the death, two years, after of the hus
band of that woman.

* * * * *

I hope you have a time of it on the
Rocky Mountains; look out for the rock

and the granny boulders: should your limbs
get sore in leaping over the quartz rocks, re
member that we have genuine Mustang linament
at 55. I recollect, in reading the Col.'s ac
count of his expedition, that he mentions taking
one colored man in the skiff with which he em
barked on Salt Lake: this fact is now becom
ing contagious for I hear of quite a number of
colored brethren, yourself, Mr. Editor, included,
who are bound to follow him up, to the sources
of a river of "that ilk," as the Scotch would
say: the fun of the thing is he don't want them.

Politics, in our lane, are at a dead-lock. Our
Radical Candidate, having in a letter to Will
iam Goodell, endorsed the Anti-Slavery of Col.
Fremont, while the unrepented vote of Col. Fre
mont, against abolishing slavery in the District
of Columbia, remains on the record of the Sen
ate—not only unrepented of, but actually
boasted of in the N. Y. Daily —we ask
each other "what is Anti-Slavery?" How can
we strike an Anti-Slavery blow in this election?

Your, affectionately,

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. .

P.S. The "pen mystery" is accounted for:
Brother WILLIAM H. DAY is in town, or his
wraith is. He doubtless gave our jeweller a com
mission to buy that pen at any cost: he wishes
to see if he can write with it. let him be care
ful how he uses it, for it will, sometimes "kick
in harness."