FREDERICK DOUGLASS TO FREDERICK DOUGLASS, JR.

Tuscola, Ill. 25 Jan[uary] 1872.

DEAR SON:

This is to tell you I am well and at work.¹Commencing with an address on Santo Domingo at the Union Park Congregational Church in Chicago on 29 December 1871, Douglass lectured across Illinois for much of January before taking up similar engagements in Indiana and Ohio. It is not confirmed whether Douglass spoke in Tuscola, a farming community in Douglas County, south of Champaign, but on 25 January 1872 he was probably in transit to Akron, Ohio, for a lecture there the following day. Champaign (Ill.) , 3, 10, 17 January 1872; St. Louis , 24 January 1872; Washington , 25 January 1872; , 1 February 1872; Seltzer, , 1967. The enclosed will show you that
though my way has been for the most part pleasant, it is not entirely so. The
extract from the is literally true, and you may copy
it into the .²Douglass refers to an article entitled “Fred. Douglass and the Planters’ House,” from the St. Louis of 24 January 1872. The newspaper reported the refusal of the Planter’s House in that city to register Douglass or to serve him dinner. After protesting, Douglass left and ate elsewhere. The newspaper reported that several other patrons expressed outrage at Douglass’s treatment. The declared: “Fred Douglass is a gentleman, so far as brains and culture and refinement can make one, and is the peer of any of the guests of the first hotels in the land.” Douglass’s reprinted the s article on the third page of its 1 February 1872 issue. Such outrages should be known. They prove the need of
Mr. Sumner’s Supplementary Civil Rights Bill,³Radical Republicans in Congress tried repeatedly to pass a comprehensive civil rights bill during the first half of the 1870s. In May 1870, Massachusetts’s Radical Republican senator Charles Sumner introduced the Supplementary Civil Rights Act, intended to build on the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and the Ku Klux Klan Acts of 1870–71. Sumner’s legislation outlawed racial discrimination by transportation carriers, places of public amusement and accommodation, public schools, juries, churches, cemeteries, and benevolent institutions incorporated by law. Democrats and key moderate Republicans stymied the law’s progress for years. When the House of Representatives passed an amnesty bill removing political disabilities from former supporters of the Confederacy in the fall of 1871, Sumner attempted to add his civil rights provisions to it as an amendment. In February 1872 and again that May, Sumner’s amendments were added to the amnesty bill, only to see the bill fail to win House approval and become law. William Dudley Foulke, , 2 vols. (Indianapolis, Ind., 1899), 2: 221–26. and at the same time that
I am in the line of my duty in asserting the rights of colored citizens, at the
points where those rights meet with most resistance. I could have saved
myself this insult, if I had shrunk from asserting my right as an American
traveler. I preferred to make the issue—for this is the only way to bring
the disease to the surface—and affect a cure. The cry of shame raised
by the Missouri will be taken up and continued by others, and
thus the barbarism of the Planter’s House⁴The second St. Louis hotel by that name, the Planter’s House of Douglass’s era, was erected on Fourth Street, bounded by Chestnut and Pine, in 1841. Four stories tall, it had three hundred guest rooms. Many dignitaries stayed there over the years, including Charles Dickens, who in his American Notes praised it as “an excellent house, and the proprietors have most bountiful notions of providing the creature comforts.” J. Thomas Scharf, (Philadelphia, 1883), 1441–42; Charles Dickens, (1842; London, 2000), 193. will be properly branded and
reprobated by all the decent and civilized people of the country.

I was glad to see that Senator Morton⁵Oliver Hazard Perry Throck Morton (1823–77) was born in Wayne County, Indiana. Removed from school at the age of fifteen and apprenticed to his brother, a hatter, Morton practiced that trade for four years. He then studied at Miami University in Ohio and began the practice of law in Centreville, Indiana, in 1847. Morton rose quickly in prominence in his new profession, largely owing to his success at representing railroad interests. Although initially a Democrat, Morton left that party in response to the Kansas-Nebraska Act and was the unsuccessful Republican candidate for governor of Indiana in 1854. Elected lieutenant governor in 1860, he succeeded to the governorship when Henry S. Lane was chosen to be a U.S. senator by the Indiana legislature. He served in that office from 1861 to 1867; during the Civil War, he engaged in bitter political conflicts with Democrats in the state legislature. From 1867 until his death, Morton was a U.S. senator. He soon broke with Andrew Johnson and became a leader of Radical Republicans and later an advocate of inflationary “soft money” policies. Foulke, ; E. Orville Johnson, “Oliver P. Morton: A Study of His Career as a Public Speaker and of His Speaking on Slavery, Civil War, and Reconstruction Issues” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1957); , 4: 431–32; , 13: 262–64; (online). had avowed his intention to
vote for Senator Sumner’s Supplementary Civil Rights Bill.⁶Morton supported Sumner’s efforts in early 1872 to add civil rights provisions to a proposed amnesty bill. He debated that measure on the Senate floor with Senator Allan Thurman of Ohio. Foulke, , 2: 221–26. He is a power
in the country, and as much as any man in it a leader of the Republican
party. No man in the party had more to overcome in regard to the position
and rights of the colored people of the United States, and no man has more
nobly triumphed over his prejudices. With his powerful aid Mr. Sumner can hardly fail to carry through the crowning measure of his life—a
measure which will put an end to the persistent effort to perpetuate the
degradation of colored American citizens.

I am now, as you see, in the heart of Illinois, in the town of Tuscola.
The public mind here is somewhat excited on the color question. Until
now the colored children in Tuscola have been entirely deprived of school
privileges, but the Board of Education sharing the growing enlightenment
and liberality of the age, have unbarred the gates and doors of the common school, and these dusky children are now to be admitted to share
its privileges.⁷During the antebellum era, Black Laws greatly restricted the rights of African Americans in Illinois. Even after repeal of the Black Laws in 1865 and ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1870, most Illinois communities still excluded blacks from their public schools. Thomas Badhe, (Athens, Ohio, 2014), 45–46, 58–60. I mention this fact with grateful emotions, but I hope the
mention of it will not be taken as an argument against the necessity of the
Supplementary Civil Rights Bill, but rather to show that there is nothing
unreasonable or impossible in the principle of that bill, or its practical
operation. Of course this measure of the Board of Education displeases
a part of the people here, and they exercise the right to speak against the

radical innovation, but reason and justice are powerful, and will certainly
prevail here as elsewhere.

A short distance below here, at Effingham,⁸The county seat of Effingham County, Effingham was a railroad and manufacturing center in central Illinois in the 1870s. In the early 1870s, black men in the town still could not vote and were excluded from many areas of public life. Badhe, , 43, 45–46; Seltzer, , 559. on the Illinois Central
Road,⁹Chartered by the state legislature in 1851, the Illinois Central Railroad completed a line across the state, from Cairo in the south to Galena in the northwest. The railroad ran a major branch line from Centralia to Chicago, which passed through Tuscola and Effingham. The Illinois Central extended its lines west into Iowa and South Dakota and south to New Orleans in the 1870s. Howard Gray Brownson, (1915; Urbana, Ill., 1967), 37–39, 45, 56, 61, 157–63. a few years ago the people would allow no person of color to settle
in the town, and any one of the race passing through it was hooted and
shouted after in the street, with all manner of opprobrious and rowdy
epithets; but the people there have become much more civilized since the
war, and are rapidly improving.

I was greatly cheered in St. Louis, by the signs of enterprise and prosperity I saw there, among the colored citizens. The city, as my treatment
at the Planter’s house will show, is still only half civilized—and the is by no means abolished there—in the sense of having his manhood
respected like other men, but in those vocations open to him, the colored man is bravely pursuing the battle of life, and endeavoring to make
his business respectable by making it prosperous. Foremost among the
young men in this line is Mr. William Robinson,¹⁰This is actually William Roberson (1836–78), who operated a barbershop and a Turkish bathhouse at 410 Market Street in St. Louis. Earlier, he had operated a barbershop in partnership with his brother Frank in the basement of the city’s Barnum Hotel. St. Louis , 17 February 1878; (St. Louis, 1872), 640, 836; Cyprian Clamorgan, (Columbia, Mo., 1999), 95. who has one of the
most elegantly fitted barber shops and bathing establishments in the West.
It almost equals the magnificent establishment of Mr. Peter Baltimore,¹¹The son of a runaway slave and Revolutionary War veteran, Peter F. Baltimore (1829–1913) inherited his father’s barbering business in Troy, New York. The extended Baltimore family was active in Troy’s Underground Railroad. Peter Baltimore’s son Garnet Douglass Baltimore, named for two leading black abolitionists, was the first African American graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and became a successful landscape architect. (Winter 2005–06), rensselaer.org.
at Troy. The way to make such business attractive, is to make it remunerative. This can be done by energy, taste, enterprize, industry, and polite
attention to customers. I do not join in the cry to quit barbering, but call
upon colored men to make the best of the profession. If colored men will
not do this, white men will. Mr. Robinson is just now refitting rooms for
which he pays a rent of three thousand dollars a year. He is building now
an elegant Turkish Bath, which will, when completed, surpass anything
of the kind in the West. He is young, enthusiastic, full of energy, and resolved to please even the most exacting and punctilious.
All colored men cannot be lawyers, doctors, preachers, and politicians, and as they are shut out from most of the handicrafts, they are wise
in making the best of bathing and barbering, and whatever other honest
vocations are open to them.

F. D.

PLIr: Washington , 1 February 1872.