Brighton

Jany 1^st 1865

My very dear Friend,

Although my remembrance of you never ceases, yet are my thoughts especially with you at this season. My first prayer at the
commencement of this new year was offered up to God on your behalf. Time as it flies—far from deadening the affection and sympathy of my heart—for my dearest and most valued friend upon Earth—only strengthens and deepens these feelings—I cannot expect to be remembered it would be unreasonable on my part. When I for a moment consider the all engrossing duties which you are at present

called upon to fulfill in the service of your people. Or that I could help you more than by bringing you with all your cares—all your wishes—all your wants—before Him who is able abundantly to help you—my beloved Friends!—As yet I see no way open to do any thing more than the very little which I have done since I first had the happiness of knowing you.

However, a letter just received from my dear friend M^rs Cheever encourages me to hope that she and her husband will be able to find some sphere of labor for me—among the freed people of the South—I do not neglect my talents for I trust—that God will grant me the long sighed for privilege to use them—were it only during a few years—for the good of your people If I come to America I mean to select a number of intelligent colored girls, and to form them for teachers. I shall endeavor to make them even more accomplished than the English girls whom I have educated. Oh—with what joy I shall work for them. I shall never feel weary and discouraged as I now often do—for I love your people—more than words can express—Nothing grieves me more—

than to hear people say—that any body will do to least the poor freed people—why should they not have the best of instructors as well as the whites! It is an injustice—which I will not tolerate—Dear friend I hope you have received my letter of October last It contained a cheque for five pounds for your own use—You know me too well to think that I expect to be thanked for it—I only hope that it is not lost—I wrote to dear RosettaSprague, Rosetta Douglass

Rosetta Douglass Sprague (1839–1906), the first child of Anna and Frederick Douglass, was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, on 24 June 1839. In her childhood, Rosetta wrote and read letters for her mother, whom she assisted with housework and with piecework for the shoe factories in Lynn, Massachusetts. Her father sent Rosetta to school at age seven in Albany, New York, where she lived with Abigail and Lydia Mott. When the Douglass family moved to Rochester, Rosetta began attending the Seward Seminary, where her presence offended the parents of one of the white students and led to her segregation from the other pupils. Her father, in a fury, removed Rosetta from the school and hired a private tutor for his daughter. Rosetta, along with her three brothers, then led other students in the efforts to desegregate Rochester’s public school system. From 1854 to 1855, Rosetta attended Oberlin College preparatory school, one of the first institutions of higher education to accept African Americans and women. She became a teacher in Philadelphia and Salem, Massachusetts, until her marriage in 1863 to Nathan Sprague, with whom she had seven children. Before her death in 1906, she wrote a memoir of her mother that remains one of the most complete documents of Anna Murray Douglass’s life. Rosetta Douglass Sprague, My Mother as I Recall Her: A Paper Read before the Anna Murray Douglass Union, W.C.T.U., May 10, 1900 (1900; Washington, D.C., 1923); Dorothy Sterling, ed., We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1984), 132–45; Ellen N. Lawson and Marlene Merrill, “The Antebellum ‘Talented Thousandth’: Black College Students at Oberlin before the Civil War,” Journal of Negro Education, 52: 145 (Spring 1983); Miriam DeCosta-Willis, “Smoothing the Tucks in Father’s Linen: The Women of Cedar Hill,” Sage, 4: 30–33 (Fall 1987); Sylvia Lyons Render, “Afro-American Women: The Outstanding and the Obscure,” Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress, 32: 306–10 (October 1975), 307–10. —at the same time—but she has not written to me since—