FREDERICK DOUGLASS TO CHARLES WESLEY SLACK¹All that has survived of this letter is an excerpt printed in the Boston and then reprinted in the New York . The latter is more explicit in stating that the letter was addressed to the ’s editor at that time, Charles Wesley Slack (1825–85). A lifelong Bostonian, Slack graduated from the Elliot Grammar School and began work for the Boston Daily Journal at age fifteen. A Republican, he represented Boston for two terms in the state legislature before the Civil War; later, he held a patronage appointment with the Treasury Department. Returning to journalism after the war, he was the proprietor and editor of the , using the publication to further the cause of Radical Reconstruction. , Vol. 8: 1880–1889 (Boston, 1907), 209; (Boston, 1885), 72–74; McPherson, , 438–39.

[n.p. c. May 1869.]²The Boston reprinted a portion of the letter from Douglass to Slack in an article entitled “minor matters.” The excerpt was prefaced with “the statue to frederick Douglass: Mr. Douglass does not take enthusiastically to the idea of a statue to himself on the Lincoln monument.” Boston , 15 May 1869.

My friends must do as they please, but my impressions are against the
statue. I am not dead yet! I am but little over fifty-two, and may live
twenty years longer—a space altogether too long for a live man to be
looking upon his dead monument, and having other people looking upon
it and upon him at the same time! I have no power in the matter, but I
want my friends to know, by some means, that I am willing to leave the
whole matter of my memory to those who survive me. Let them turn their
attention to dear old John Brown, with whom I was not worthy to die at
Harper’s Ferry. Let us see the heroic form of this true martyr to liberty on
the Lincoln monument!³Following this excerpt from Douglass’s letter, the briefly stated: “This note is characteristic of the good judgment and disinterested purpose of the eminent orator.” Boston , 15 May 1869.

PLf: , 22 May 1869.