FREDERICK DOUGLASS TO GERRIT SMITH

Rochester, [N.Y.] 9 Aug[ust] 1867.

HON GERRIT SMITH

MY DEAR SIR,

You were neither present nor represented at the taking of my deposition,
last month, in your Suit with the Chicago Tribune.¹In a letter dated 31 March 1867, Douglass told Smith, “In passing through Chicago last week—I find I am to be summoned as a witness by the Tribune folks—to tell all I know of the John Brown Affair.” Smith allowed the letter of 9 August 1867 from Douglass to be made public, but omitted the first paragraph. Douglass to Gerrit Smith, 31 March 1867, Smith Papers, NSyU; Frothingham, Gerrit Smith, 255–56. Hence the tenor of
some parts of it may be somewhat different from what it would have been

had I been cross questioned. In saying so I impute blame to no one. There
was nothing unfair nor unpleasant in the taking of my Deposition.

I wish to say distinctly that John Brown never declared nor intimated
to me that he was about to embark in a grand or unqualif[ied] Insurrection, that the only Insurrection he proposed was the escaping of slaves and
their standing for their lives against any who should [pursue] them[.] For
years before Captain Brown’s long entertained plan was to go <to> the
mountains in the slave States and invite the slaves to flee there and stand
for Their freedom. His object was to make slave property unprofitable
by making it insecure. He told me he had given to you a general idea of
this plan, but that he had not given you the full particulars less that you
might turn from him as a visionary and dangerous man. These <Three>
or four weeks previous to his invasion of Harpers Ferry, Captain Brown
requested me to have an interview with him at Chambersburg Pa—I did
<had>it; and in that interview he informed me that he had determined
upon that invasion instead of carrying out his old plan of going into the
mountains.²Two months before the Harpers Ferry raid in October 1859, John Brown requested Douglass to meet him near Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. In mid-August, Douglass and Shields Green, a fellow former slave from Rochester, met with Brown and John Kagi, Brown’s secretary, in an old stone quarry on the Conococheague River. The group met over the course of a weekend, and their conversations consisted mostly of Brown and Douglass debating whether to proceed with the original plan of establishing a base in the Blue Ridge Mountains to assist escaping slaves or to commit to a raid on the Harpers Ferry Armory. Ultimately, Douglass realized that Brown was committed to the Harpers Ferry plan and that there was no changing his mind. Douglass declined to join Brown, believing the mission to be “a trap of steel.” Shields Green, who participated in the abortive raid, was executed on 19 December 1859. Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 5: 31–32, ser. 2, 3: 248; Oates, To Purge This Land, 282–83. He did not tell me that you knew anything of this new plan.
I do not suppose that any of his friends outside of his own family, at the
not North knew of it.

Captain Brown never told me that you knew anything of his guns or
other weapons.

You are at full Liberty to make use of this Statement in any way you
may deem proper.

As ever, yours very truly

FREDK DOUGLASS.

P. S. This would have been mailed to Peterboro immediately after you left
Rochester had I not supposed you at the white mountains.³Probably a reference to the White Mountains of New Hampshire, part of the Appalachian Mountain system. There is no record confirming that Gerrit Smith traveled to either Rochester or the White Mountains in 1867. Leon E. Seltzer, ed., The Columbia Lippincott Gazetteer of the World (1952; New York, 1970), 2087.

I have left out a line or two which I deemed covered sufficiently by
that I have already written. Your visit here was a most pleasant surprise—
not less to Mrs Douglass⁴Anna Murray Douglass. and Miss Assing⁵Probably Ottilie Assing (1819–84), who was born to Rosa Maria Antoinette Pauline Assing, a Christian, and Assur David Assing, a Jew, in Hamburg, Germany. Assing received an accelerated education from her mother, and was generally described as bright and vivacious. After the death of her mother in 1840 and father in 1842, Ottilie and her younger sister Ludmilla spent time with relatives, but she grew despondent and attempted suicide in 1843. After returning to Hamburg, Assing began writing reviews of local culture. In 1851 she became a correspondent for the German periodical Morgenblatt für gebildete Leser. Assing first met Frederick Douglass when she came to America in 1855, supposedly inspired to make his acquaintance after reading My Bondage and My Freedom. In Rochester, she interviewed him for an article that subsequently appeared in the Morgenblatt. In succeeding years, Assing published numerous articles about Douglass for her German readers, and also translated My Bondage and My Freedom into German, contributing an introduction. In 1856, the two began an intimate relationship that lasted twenty-eight years. During that time, Douglass and Assing corresponded regularly. When in the United States, Assing was a regular visitor at the Douglass home in Rochester, including during the summer of 1858, when she probably accompanied Douglass to the West Indian Emancipation celebrations in Poughkeepsie. She was friendly with his children, although his wife, Anna Murray, did not approve of her husband’s relationship. Douglass and Assing often appeared in public together, but contemporary public speculation did not question the propriety of their relationship. Following Anna Murray Douglass’s death in 1882, Assing hoped that she might become Mrs. Frederick Douglass. But in January 1884, while Assing was in Europe, Douglass married his secretary, Helen Pitts. Increasingly ill, possibly from cancer, and despondent over Douglass’s rejection, Assing committed suicide in a Paris park on 21 August 1884. She left her entire estate to Douglass. Christoph K. Lohmann, ed., Radical Passion: Ottilie Assing’s Reports from America and Letters to Frederick Douglass (New York, 1999), 69, 329–62; Diedrich, Love across Color Lines, 7, 23, 38, 56, 184, 203, 368, 371. than to myself. My friend
Remond⁶Charles Lenox Remond (1810–73), the first black lecturer hired by any antislavery society, was born in Salem, Massachusetts, to the daughter of a black hero of the American Revolution and a former slave from Curaçao. In his youth, he learned about the horrors of slavery from his father and experienced segregation and discrimination from northern whites. In the late 1820s and early 1830s, Remond read David Walker’s Appeal and became acquainted with William Lloyd Garrison, which led him to dedicate his life to abolitionism. He became an agent for the Liberator and joined the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society shortly thereafter. In 1838, he began lecturing for the American Anti-Slavery Society. Both his color and his ability made him a very popular speaker in both the United States and Great Britain, where he attended the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention as a delegate in 1840. Remond was the sole black lecturer for antislavery societies until Frederick Douglass began speaking publicly in 1842. For a time, Remond and Douglass worked the lecture circuit together, and Douglass admired Remond, the more experienced speaker, even naming a son for him. Through the 1840s, however, Remond remained a steadfast Garrisonian, while Douglass moved toward political action to end slavery, and their friendship suffered. Their goals remained the same, and like Douglass, Remond recruited black soldiers for the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry during the Civil War. After the war, just before his death, Remond urged abolitionists to continue their fight by combating the racial prejudice that persisted in both the North and South after the end of slavery. Remond joined Douglass and Perry Downs in an address at Watkins, New York, on 1 August 1867. Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 4: xxiii; Les Wallace, “Charles Lenox Remond: The Lost Prince of Abolitionism,” NHB, 40: 696–701 (May–June 1977); William E. Ward, “Charles Lenox Remond: Black Abolitionist, 1838–1873” (Ph.D. diss., Clark University, 1977); NCAB, 2: 303; DAB, 15: 499–500. who I was looking for has not yet reached me. Tomorrow I
leave home to speak in Penn Yan⁷The Penn Yan Yates County Chronicle reported that Douglass spoke at Bush’s Hall in that community on 14 August 1867. Douglass was reported as criticizing President Andrew Johnson for using the power of the presidency to block efforts to protect the rights of the freed slaves. The newspaper disagreed with the tenor of Douglass’s remarks, arguing that “there is already hate and prejudice enough, and that magnanimity toward captured foes, so far as it can be safely exercised, is better than hate.” Penn Yan (N.Y.) Yates County Chronicle, 22 August 1867.—Thence I shall go to Addison Steuben
County,⁸Douglass tells Smith that he will speak in Addison, a small farming community in Steuben County nine miles southwest of Corning, New York, and fifty miles south of Penn Yan. No report of Douglass’s address in Addison has survived. Seltzer, Columbia Lippincott Gazetteer, 11. and thence home on Saturday—

Your note sent by the Colored lad from the Hotel came safely—

F. D.

ALS: General Correspondence File, reel 2, frames 294–96, FD Papers, DLC; Gerrit Smith
Papers, NSyU.