FREDERICK DOUGLASS TO ANNA E. DICKINSON¹Philadelphia-born and Quaker-educated, Anna Elizabeth Dickinson (1842–1932) worked first as a copyist, then as a schoolteacher, and finally as an employee of the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia. At the age of eighteen, she first appeared on lecture platforms as a feminist and antislavery crusader. After losing her job at the mint in December 1861 for accusing General George B. McClellan of treason, she became a full-time lecturer. Throughout the Civil War, Dickinson delivered Republican campaign speeches in New Hampshire, Connecticut, New York, and Pennsylvania, and on 16 January 1864 she spoke before a distinguished audience of statesmen and military officials, including President Lincoln, in the hall of the House of Representatives. At the end of the war she joined the lyceum lecture circuit, speaking on behalf of Radical Republican Reconstruction measures and women’s rights, and against Mormonism, large corporations, and craft unions. In the early 1870s, Dickinson’s popularity as an orator waned, and her attempts at comebacks, first as a playwright and actress in the late 1870s and early 1880s and then as a political orator during the 1888 election, proved unsuccessful. She spent the last forty years of her life in obscurity. Giraud Chester, (New York, 1951); J. Matthew Gallman, (New York, 2006), 34–35; , 63 vols. (New York, 1898–1984), 3:109; , 21: 244–45; , 1: 475–76.

Rochester, [N.Y.] 10 Sept[ember] 1866.

DEAR ANNA:

My heart is full to overflowing. I am grateful to you and Dear Mr Tilton.²Theodore Tilton (1835–1907), journalist, poet, and public lecturer, was born in New York City, where he attended the Free Academy (today, City University of New York). As a reporter for the New York Observer he made the acquaintance of the Reverends Henry Ward Beecher and George B. Cheever, who were instrumental in his becoming, in 1856, the managing editor of the New York , a popular religious journal. In the early 1860s Tilton tried to recruit Douglass as a regular contributor to the Independent, and the two became friends. Tilton succeeded Beecher as editor of the Independent in 1862 and continued in that position until 1871. After the Civil War, he also became a popular speaker on the topics of Radical Reconstruction and women’s rights. However, Tilton’s public career never recovered from the notoriety he attracted in 1874 as a result of an unsuccessful lawsuit that charged Beecher with committing adultery with his wife. Subsequent journalistic efforts failed, and Tilton left the United States for Europe in 1883. He eventually settled in Paris, where he wrote essays and poetry to support himself. When Douglass visited Paris in 1886, Tilton served as his guide. On Douglass’s death, Tilton published (Paris, 1895). Douglass to Theodore Tilton, 22 November 1860, 2 December 1869, FD Papers, NRU; Douglass to Theodore Tilton, 2 September 1867, FD Papers, NHi; Theodore Tilton to Douglass, 30 April, 22 October 1862, 20 April 1869, 5 September 1882, General Correspondence File, reel 1, frames 718–19, 745–47, reel 2, frames 464–66, and reel 3, frames 627–31, FD Papers, DLC; Chicago , 28 April 1887; New York , 26 May 1907; New York , 10 December 1908; Robert Shaplen, (New York, 1954); , 6 vols. (New York, 1888–89), 6: 120; , 2: 129–35.
To you belong the honor of rescuing the great Convention of the unreconstructed States³The Southern Loyalist Convention. from Moral and political destruction, and of whirling, by
your your eloquence, its powerful ranks, into the great Army of Equal
rights. God bless you both for it. You have no time to read long letters—
and I have no time to write them. Remember me gratefully to your Mother
and your witty Sister Susan.⁴Mary Edmondson Dickinson (1806–95) was a devout Quaker who married the merchant John Dickinson after a thirteen-year courtship. When her husband died, in 1845, she never remarried, raising her five children, including the youngest, Anna, while running a school and boardinghouse. Anna supported her invalid mother and her elder sister Susan (1833–1915) financially in later years with proceeds from lecturing and stage performances. While the Dickinsons initially lived in relative luxury in a Philadelphia townhouse, they relocated in 1877 to a humbler residence in West Pittston, Pennsylvania, where family relations became strained. Susan had Anna briefly committed to an insane asylum in 1891, and the two never reconciled. Susan, who had been a teacher in her youth, subsequently supported herself as a journalist. Chester, , 12–14, 22–23, 108–09, 153–54, 203, 231, 292; Gallman, , 9–10, 149, 152, 181–84, 191–94, 196.

Yours to the end—

FREDERICK DOUG LASS—

ALS: Anna E. Dickinson Papers, box 7, DLC.