FREDERICK DOUGLASS TO CROSBY STUART NOYES¹Born in Minot, Maine, Crosby Stuart Noyes (1825–1908) had the desire to be a journalist from childhood. After writing for several newspapers, he settled in Washington as a correspondent for the . Through his political connections, he established that paper as a semiofficial outlet for presidential announcements from Lincoln’s administration. Rising through the ranks at the , Noyes eventually became editor in chief and co-owner of the paper with Samuel H. Kauffmann and George Adams. After the Civil War, he used the newspaper to promote the infrastructure improvements in the District undertaken by Alexander Robey Shepherd. Later in his career, he helped establish the first public library in Kensington, Maryland, which is now called the Noyes Children’s Library. Los Angeles , 22 February 1908; Harvey W. Crew, (Dayton, Ohio, 1892), 459–61; Proctor, , 4: 890–894; Find a Grave (online).

Washington, D.C. 12 May 1877.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE WASHINGTON EVENING STAR:

SIR:

You were mistaken in representing me as being off on a lecturing tour,
and by implication neglecting my duties as United States Marshal for the
District of Columbia.²The Washington reported on Douglass’s lecture “Our National Capital” in its 10 May 1877 issue. , ser. 1, 4: 475. My absence from Washington during two days was
due to an invitation by the managers to be present on the occasion of the
inauguration of the International Exhibition in Philadelphia. In complying
with this invitation I found myself in company with other members of the
government who went thither in obedience to the call of patriotism and
civilization. No one interest of the Marshal’s office suffered by my temporary absence, as I had seen to it that those upon whom the duties of the
office devolved were honest, capable, industrious, painstaking and faithful. My deputy marshal³As his deputy marshal, Douglass selected L. P. Williams (c. 1831–?), a former newspaper editor from La Porte, Indiana, who in the spring of 1852 worked briefly on the short-lived Westville (Ind.) . After serving in the Union army during the Civil War, where he attained the rank of major, Williams moved permanently to Washington, D.C., living near Howard University. In Washington, Williams became an assistant clerk for the District’s Supreme Court before accepting the position of Douglass’s deputy marshal on 20 March 1877, replacing Colonel George W. Phillips. 1870 U.S. Census, District of Columbia, Washington, 738; Washington , 19 March 1877; New York , 20 March 1877; Jasper Packard, (La Porte, 1876), 78; E. D. Daniels, (Chicago, 1904), 248–49; Douglass Zevely, “Old Residences and Family History in the City Hall Neighborhood,” , 7: 146–49 (1904). is a man every way qualified for his position, and
the citizens of Washington may rest assured that no unfaithful man will
be retained in any position under me. Of course I can have nothing to say
as to my own fitness for the position I hold. You have a right to say what
you please on that point; yet I think it would be only fair and generous to
wait for some dereliction of duty on my part before I shall be adjudged as
incompetent to fill the place.

You will allow me to say, also, that the attacks upon me on account
of the remarks alleged to have been made by me in Baltimore, strike me
as both malicious and silly. Washington is a great city, not a village nor
a hamlet, but the capital of a great nation, and the manners and habits of
its various classes are proper subjects for presentation and criticism, and I
very much mistake if this great city can be thrown into a tempest of passion by any humorous reflections I may take the liberty to utter. The city

is too great to be small, and I think it will laugh at the ridiculous attempt
to rouse it to a point of furious hostility to me for anything said in my
Baltimore lecture.

Had the reporters of that lecture been as careful to note what I said in
praise of Washington as what was said, if you please, in disparagement of
it, it would have been impossible to have awakened any feeling against me
in this community for what I said. It is the easiest thing in the world, as all
editors know, to pervert the meaning and give a one-sided impression of
a whole speech, by simply giving isolated passages from the speech itself,
without their qualifying connections.⁴Several manuscript copies of Douglass’s lecture on Washington have survived among the papers preserved by his wife Helen Pitts Douglass at their Cedar Hill home and later donated to the Library of Congress. Approximations of all of the portions of that lecture quoted or paraphrased by Douglass in this letter can be found in those texts. , ser. 1, 4:443–74; Speech File, reel 15, frames 56–96, 97–146, 147–85, 186–229, 231–49, FD Papers, DLC. It would hardly be imagined from
anything that has appeared here that I had said one word in that lecture at
Baltimore, in honor of Washington, and yet the lecture itself, as a whole,
was decidedly in the interest of the national capital. I am not such a fool
as to decry a city in which I have invested my money and made my permanent residence.

After speaking of the power of the sentiment of patriotism, I held
this language in the lecture for which I am now so fiercely assailed: “In
the spirit of this noble sentiment, I would have the American people view
the national capital. It is our national center. It belongs to us; and whether
it is mean or majestic, whether arrayed in glory or covered with shame,
we cannot but share its character and its destiny. In the remotest section
of the republic, in the most distant parts of the globe, amid the splendors
of Europe, or the wilds of Africa, we are still held and firmly bound to
this common center. Under the shadow of Bunker Hill monument,⁵The Bunker Hill Monument, a 222-foot granite obelisk, was erected between 1825 and 1842 on the famous battle site in Boston. Douglass probably attended the monument’s formal dedication ceremonies on 17 June 1843, when Daniel Webster delivered the principal public address. , ser. 1, 1: 80n; Frederick Lewis Weis, ; Daniel Webster,, 18 vols., national ed. (Boston, 1903), 1: 233–84. in the
peerless eloquence of his diction, I once heard the great Daniel Webster
give welcome to all American citizens, assuring them that wherever else
they might be strangers, they were all at home there. The same boundless
welcome is given to all American citizens by Washington. Elsewhere we
may belong to individual states, but here we belong to the whole United
States. Elsewhere we may belong to a section, but here we belong to the
whole country, and the whole country belongs to us. It is national territory,
and the one place where no American is an intruder or a carpet bagger.
The new-comer is not less at home than the old-resident. Under its lofty
domes and stately pillars, as under the broad blue sky, all races and colors
of men stand upon a footing of common equality.

The wealth and magnificence which elsewhere might oppress the
humble citizen has an opposite effect here. They are felt to be a part of
himself, and serve to ennoble him in his own eyes. He is an owner of
the marble grandeur which he beholds about him—as much so as any

of the forty millions of this great nation. Once in his life every American who can should visit Washington; not as the Mahometan to Mecca;⁶Mecca, the holiest city of Islam, is located on the Arabian Peninsula, forty-five miles from the Red Sea. The city is the site of the Kaaba, a small, cube-shaped stone temple believed to have been built by Abraham, and of the Zamzam, a sacred well that figured in the biblical account of Hagar and Ishmael. The fifth and final tenet of the Islamic faith is that all believers, unless ill or impoverished, must make a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in their lives. Vergilius Ferm, (New York, 1945), 412, 478, 500–02.
not as the Catholic to Rome; not as the Hebrew to Jerusalem; nor as the
Chinaman to the Flowery Kingdom;
⁷The Chinese people do not refer to their country as “China” nor to themselves as “Chinese.” Among the names that its people use for the land are “Chung Kwoh,” the Middle Kingdom, and “Chung Hwa Kwoh,” the Middle Flowery Kingdom. The term “Hwa” carries the sense that its people are civilized and refined. G. W. Peck, “China,” , 1: 231–39 (March 1848). but in the spirit of enlightened patriotism, knowing the value of free institutions and how to maintain and
perpetuate them.

Washington should be contemplated not merely as an assemblage of
fine buildings; not merely as the chosen resort of the wealth and fashion
of the country; not merely as the honored place where the statesmen of
the nation assemble to shape the policy and frame the laws; not merely as
the point at which we are most visibly touched by the outside world, and
where the diplomatic skill and talent of the old continent meet and match
themselves against those of the new; but as the national flag itself, a glorious symbol of civil and religious liberty, leading the world in the race of
social science, civilization and renown.

My lecture in Baltimore required more than an hour and a half for its
delivery, and every intelligent reader will see the difficulty of doing justice to such a speech when it is abbreviated and compressed into a half or
three-quarters of a column. Such abbreviation and condensation has been
resorted to in this instance. A few stray sentences, called out from their
connections, would be deprived of much of their harshness if presented
in the form and connection in which they were uttered; but I am taking
up too much of your space, and will close with the last paragraph of the
lecture as delivered in Baltimore. “No city in the broad world has a higher
or more beneficent mission. Among all the great capitals of the world it
is pre-eminently the capital of free institutions. Its fall would be a blow
to freedom and progress throughout the world. Let it stand then where it
now does stand, where the Father of his Country planted it,⁸The Continental Congress left Philadelphia in 1783 and met in a series of locations while looking for a permanent site for a national capital. Final selection was not completed until the first Congress under the new Constitution passed a law on 16 July 1790 authorizing President Washington to choose a ten-mile-square site along the Potomac River between Maryland and Virginia. The Potomac was selected in part to honor Washington, who resided along its banks at Mount Vernon and who had invested in improving the river as a major commercial artery into the interior. Another reason Congress chose to locate the capital in the South was an arrangement negotiated by Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton whereby the federal government assumed unpaid Revolutionary War state debts owed primarily by the North, and the South would receive the benefit of having the capital nearby. Green, , 1: 7–13; William Tindall, (Washington, 1909), 21–56; Wilhelmus Bogart Bryan, , 2 vols. (New York, 1914), 1: 8–12. and where it
has stood for more than a half a century. No longer sandwiched between
two slave states, no longer a contradiction to human progress; no longer
the hot-bed of slavery in the slave trade; no longer the home of the duelist,
the gambler and the assassin; no longer the frantic partisan of one section
of the country against the other; no longer anchored to a dark and semibarbarous past, but a redeemed city, beautiful to the eye and attractive to
the heart, a bond of perpetual union, an angel of peace on earth and good
will toward men, a common ground, upon which Americans of all races
and colors, all sections, north and south, may meet and shake hands, not
over a chasm of blood, but over a free, united and progressive republic.”

FRED’K DOUGLASS

PLSr: Washington 12 May 1877.