FREDERICK DOUGLASS TO GERRIT SMITH

Rochester[, N.Y.] 24 Aug[ust] 1868.

HON: GERRIT SMITH:

MY DEAR SIR:

I am very glad again to see your hand writing. Though under the weight of
seventy one years,¹Gerrit Smith was born in Utica, New York, on 6 March 1797. Harlow, Gerrit Smith, 3. it remains strong, clear, and characteristic.

I am glad you like my article on Mr Seymour’s²Horatio Seymour (1810–86) began his career as a New York Democrat in the 1840s. He was elected to the state legislature in 1841, became mayor of Utica in 1842, and returned to the legislature in 1844, where he was a strong advocate for improving the Erie Canal. Seymour was a member of the Hunker faction of the New York Democratic party, opposed to Martin Van Buren. Along with the other Hunkers, Seymour supported James K. Polk’s policy to extend slavery. When the Hunkers gained control of the Democratic party after 1848, Seymour was their candidate for governor. During his term as governor, his opposition to nativism and his veto of the antiliquor Maine Law cost him his bid for reelection. In 1862, after a decade of retirement, Seymour was again elected governor of New York, and once in office he worked to delay and limit implementation of the Civil War draft. He was defeated in the 1864 gubernatorial election but remained politically active. In 1868 he was the reluctant and unsuccessful Democratic presidential nominee. Steward Mitchell, Horatio Seymour of New York (Cambridge, Mass., 1938); ACAB, 5: 470–73; DAB, 16: 615–21; ANB, 19: 687–88. letter—Your old affection for Chief Justice Chase, easily explains your tenderness towards
him. I continued to trust him till I found him willing to abandon negro
suffrage to make himself the nominee of the Democratic Party. I must
then drop him or drop the cause.³Douglass seems to conflate two recently published pieces that he wrote on the political situation in 1868. He endorsed the Republican presidential ticket of Ulysses S. Grant and Schuyler Colfax over the Democrats Horatio Seymour and Frank P. Blair in an article for the New York Independent. He condemned Seymour for resisting the draft and courting the support of former Confederates. In an article published in the New York National Anti-Slavery Standard, Douglass rebuked Salmon P. Chase for attempting to win the Democratic presidential nomination. In that article, Douglass observed that Gerrit Smith had issued a printed circular encouraging the Democrats to select Chase. In the Standard piece, Douglass professed a belief that Smith must have changed his mind after Chase made a speech to the Democratic National Convention that attempted to portray his views as being in line with those of the party. NASS, 18 July 1868; New York Independent, 27 August 1868.

Your voice for Grant⁴Ulysses Simpson Grant (1822–85) was raised in Hiram, Ohio, and apprenticed under his father as a tanner. An appointment to the U.S. Military Academy changed Grant’s life. After graduating in 1854, he served with distinction in the Mexican War, but problems with alcohol caused him to resign his commission in 1854. He rejoined the army after the attack on Fort Sumter and rose through the ranks rapidly, becoming general in chief of all Union armies in the final year of the Civil War and personally directing Union forces in Virginia in 1864–65. President Johnson appointed him acting secretary of war upon the removal of Edwin Stanton, but Grant resigned the post rather than become embroiled in the president’s feud with Radical Republicans in Congress. The Republican party nominated Grant as its presidential candidate in May 1868, and he won election over the Democrat Horatio Seymour that fall. Politically inexperienced, Grant served two terms (1869–77) in the White House, struggling to enforce Reconstruction policies and battling charges of nepotism and corruption within his administration. Efforts to win a third Republican nomination in 1876 and 1880 failed. Dismissed by many contemporaries and later scholars as a failed president, modern assessments of his administration have been more positive. Charles W. Calhoun, The Presidency of Ulysses S. Grant (Lawrence, Kans., 2017); William S. McFeely, Grant: A Biography (New York, 1981); ACAB, 2: 709–25; DAB, 7: 492–501. and Colfax⁵Schuyler Colfax. will be potent in this State. It will
be grand if at your age—you can address the multitude without detriment to your health. I am this summer endeavoring to make myself a
little more familiar with history. My ignorance of the past has long been
a trouble to me.

Always your grateful friend

FREDERICK DOUG LASS.

ALS: Gerrit Smith Papers, NSyU.