FREDERICK DOUGLASS TO GERRIT SMITH¹Gerrit Smith (1797–1874), a New York businessman and land speculator, became best known for his philanthropic work for such reform causes as temperance and abolition. Between 1828 and 1835, he donated large sums of money to the American Colonization Society, but abandoned that movement in 1835 when his sympathies shifted to the immediate abolitionists. In the 1840s, he gave approximately 140,000 acres of land in upstate New York to three thousand black settlers, thus qualifying them to vote. Smith was a founder and frequent candidate of the Liberty party, running for governor of New York on that ticket in 1840 and winning a seat in Congress in 1852. When the Free Soil merger with moderate antislavery Democrats and Whigs lured away many Liberty party supporters, Smith helped bankroll that organization until 1860. Smith befriended Douglass when the latter moved to Rochester, and Smith frequently helped finance Frederick Douglass’ Paper. Like Douglass, Smith supported John Brown, but psychological stress caused by the failure at Harpers Ferry brought on the first of a series of bipolar episodes that greatly reduced his subsequent reform activities. Ralph Volney Harlow, Gerrit Smith: Philanthropist and Reformer (1939; New York, 1972); Gerald Sorin, The New York Abolitionists: A Case Study of Political Radicalism (Westport, Conn., 1971), 269–87; Lewis Perry, Radical Abolitionism: Anarchy and the Government of God in Antislavery Thought (Ithaca, N.Y., 1973), 170–80; John R. McKivigan and Madeleine Leveille, “The ‘Black Dream’ of Gerrit Smith, New York Abolitionist,” Syracuse University Library Associates Courier, 20: 61–76 (Fall 1985); NCAB, 2: 322–23; DAB, 17: 270–71.

Rochester, [N.Y.] 31 Mar[ch] 1867.

MY DEAR SIR:

I am just home from a three months tour in the west and am to leave again
on Monday to be absent for five or six weeks longer when I shall, if all
be well, return home for a little quiet.²During the winter lyceum season of 1866–67, Douglass combined his criticism of President Andrew Johnson and his views on the constitutional powers granted to presidents in a lecture entitled “Sources of Danger to the Republic,” which he apparently first delivered in Brooklyn, New York, on 17 December 1866. He then took his message to audiences in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Douglass lectured to generally receptive listeners as far west as Missouri, Iowa, and Minnesota before returning home to Rochester in March 1867. Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 4: lxxii–xxiii, 149, 593–94. You do not know how much your
kind word about my St Louis Speech³On the evening of 7 February 1867, Douglass delivered “Sources of Danger to the Republic” before an overflow audience at Turner’s Hall in St. Louis, Missouri. According to the Daily Missouri Democrat, the audience’s frequent applause and cheering proved that the speaker had met “the highest expectations of his numerous warm friends in St. Louis.” St. Louis Daily Missouri Democrat, 8, 11 February 1867. did for me. I have just folded it in a
letter to my friend Julia⁴Julia Griffiths (1812–95) first met Douglass during the latter half of 1846, when he lectured in her hometown of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Her father had been a friend of William Wilberforce, who had advocated the abolition of slavery in England, and she was active in the British antislavery movement. Charmed by the American, Griffiths followed Douglass back to the United States with her younger sister Eliza in 1848. In 1850, Eliza married John Dick, one of Douglass’s printers for the North Star, and the couple moved to Toronto. Julia became a constant companion and partner to Douglass and a leading antislavery organizer in Rochester for the next five years. She contributed to the North Star as a copy editor and a journalist, also saving the paper from financial ruin by organizing its books and by aggressively pursuing subscribers and donations. She helped found the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society, acting as its secretary, and organized the Rochester Anti-Slavery Fair. Initially, she lived with the Douglass family, which led to tension in the household and to unsubstantiated rumors that Douglass and Griffiths shared more than a business relationship. In 1853, the vicious attacks on her in abolitionist newspapers drove her from the Douglass home and finally forced her in 1855 to return to England, ostensibly to raise funds for the North Star. In 1859, she married a Methodist minister from Halifax, Henry O. Crofts (?–1880), who acted as an agent for Frederick Douglass’ Paper. Through the Civil War, she continued to organize and revitalize women’s antislavery societies and lecture against slavery. After the war and her husband’s death, she ran a boarding school and worked as a governess. Her friendship with Douglass continued in frequent correspondence, and she welcomed him and his second wife, Helen Pitts Douglass, when they visited England in 1886. Maria Diedrich, Love across Color Lines: Ottilie Assing and Frederick Douglass (New York, 1999), 179–84; Waldo E. Martin, Jr., The Mind of Frederick Douglass (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1984), 40–41; Erwin Palmer, “A Partnership in the Abolition Movement,” University of Rochester Library Bulletin, 26: 1–17 (Autumn/Winter 1970–71). and sent it to England—I am sure it will give her
pleasure to read it.

In passing through Chicago last week—I find I am to be summoned
as a witness by the Tribune folks⁵In June 1865, Gerrit Smith joined Horace Greeley and other northerners in suggesting leniency for the captured Confederate president, Jefferson Davis. This caused a backlash against Smith in some of the Republican press, none stronger than that coming from the Chicago Tribune’s editor, Horace White. The Tribune called Smith “a feeble intellect” and repeated the account of his treatment for insanity following the Harpers Ferry raid. Subsequent stories implied that Smith had feigned insanity in order to avoid arrest and prosecution for his support of John Brown. Smith demanded an apology from the Tribune for its “numerous gross, and cruel falsehoods.” When White refused, Smith filed suit in December 1865 for $50,000 in damages. The lawsuit dragged on for over a year and brought the issue of Smith’s connection with John Brown back to public attention, with the Tribune publishing new evidence that Smith had been a knowing accomplice of Brown’s. The Tribune settled the suit in July 1867 with the public admission that Smith had been genuinely insane in the immediate aftermath of the raid. Smith used the opportunity to issue a blanket denial of his having advance knowledge of Brown’s violent intentions. This caused Smith’s biographer Octavius B. Frothingham to charge that Smith was thereby denying his attendance at several key planning meetings for the Harpers Ferry raid. Smith’s family later forced a new edition of that biography to be published, omitting Frothingham’s evidence of Smith’s complicity. Octavius Brooks Frothingham, Gerrit Smith: A Biography (New York, 1878), 238–66; Harlow, Gerrit Smith, 450–54.—to tell all I know of the John Brown⁶Born in Torrington, Connecticut, John Brown (1790–1859) grew up in Hudson, Ohio. After receiving a rudimentary education, he attempted but failed at earning a living as a tanner, a wool dealer, and a farmer. A longtime supporter of emancipation, Brown became more militant in his antislavery activities after passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. In 1855, Brown followed four of his sons to Kansas, where he became a leader of the armed opposition to the admission of the territory as a slave state. His participation in the massacre of proslavery settlers at Pottawatomie Creek in May 1856 made him a nationally known figure. In 1857, Brown secretly began to recruit men and raise funds for a plan to establish a base in the southern Appalachian Mountains from which they could raid plantations and free slaves. Brown’s plotting culminated in the unsuccessful attack by a small band on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in October 1859. Captured and tried for treason under Virginia law, he was executed on 2 December 1859; he immediately became a martyr to many northerners. Stephen Oates, To Purge This Land with Blood: A Biography of John Brown, 2d. ed. (New York, 1984); Richard O. Boyer, The Legend of John Brown: A Biography and a History (New York, 1973); ACAB, 1: 404–07; NCAB, 2: 307–08; DAB, 3: 131–34.
Affair—They are evidently a good deal disturbed—and are moving in all
directions for defense. I infer this from talking with one of the Editors.

I fear, however, that you will not get justice in Chicago—They will
try to make out that the words employed are not libellous—and in Chicago they may succeed in getting such a decision—but they are evidently
uneasy, I think even now that they would be willing to make an ample

retractation. Is this too late?—The plain inference from their words is
an accusation of the most damaging kind; and they ought to retract or
suffer—

I am, dear friend, Always yours truly

FREDERICK DOUG LASS

[P.S.] The Tribune folks have been to Boston: To Mayor Sternes:⁷A leading financial supporter of John Brown, George Luther Stearns (1809–67) was the son of a teacher from Medford, Massachusetts. Stearns earned progressively larger fortunes as a ship chandler, a linseed oil processor, and a lead pipe manufacturer. He joined the antislavery movement in the early 1840s as a Liberty party activist and later as an important organizer of the Massachusetts Free Soil and Republican parties. While chairman of a committee to raise funds to arm freestate settlers in the Kansas Territory, Stearns met John Brown and became a convert to his plan for inciting a slave insurrection. Stearns fled to Canada after Harpers Ferry but soon returned to the United States. He testified before congressional investigators that he had had no advance knowledge of Brown’s plans and now condemned the attack. During the Civil War, Massachusetts governor John A. Andrew engaged Stearns to enlist troops for the first black regiment raised in the North, the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry. Establishing recruiting offices across the North and Canada and hiring agents, including Frederick Douglass, Stearns quickly enlisted enough blacks to fill two regiments for Massachusetts. Impressed by his success, the federal government commissioned Stearns a major and placed him in charge of recruiting blacks for federal army units. By January 1864, Stearns had brought substantial order to these efforts, but then resigned, in part, to protest the unequal pay and treatment of black soldiers. He remained a friend of equal rights for blacks, and in the 1860s he helped found such periodicals as the Nation and the Right Way in order to champion that cause. Frank Preston Stearns, The Life and Public Services of George Luther Stearns (Philadelphia, 1907); Dudley Taylor Cornish, The Sable Arm: Negro Troops in the Union Army, 1861–1865 (New York, 1956), 235–38, 242–43; Jeffery Rossbach, Ambivalent Conspirators: John Brown, the Secret Six, and a Theory of Slave Violence (Philadelphia, 1982), 56–63, 83–85, 221–23, 239–40, 254–57. Mr Garrison⁸William Lloyd Garrison (1805–79) was so closely identified with the abolitionist movement in the United States that his name became almost synonymous with the cause. He began his career as an apprentice printer on the Newburyport (Mass.) Herald at the age of thirteen. Garrison became editor of the Newburyport Free Press in 1826, but the paper closed within a year. He was then associated with a series of periodicals in Boston that advocated reforms such as temperance and sabbatarianism. After Benjamin Lundy introduced him to the antislavery cause, the two edited the Genius of Universal Emancipation in Baltimore, Maryland, from 1829 to 1830, when a libel suit against them forced the paper to close and landed Garrison in jail. After his release, he courted wealthy merchants in New York and Boston in order to finance the Liberator (1831–65), a weekly Boston-based journal in which he advocated an immediate end to slavery. Garrison’s brand of abolition condemned any institution that tolerated the existence of slavery, including churches, political parties, and even the United States itself, along with any scheme aimed at removing black people from the United States. Instead, Garrison hoped to raise the public’s awareness that slavery was morally wrong, thereby forcing its end in an almost millennial moment of emancipation. His approach appealed to both white and black antislavery advocates, but earned him many enemies among those only moderately opposed to slavery and slaveholders alike. Seeing the need for greater action and organization beyond the pages of the Liberator, Garrison joined with other abolitionists to form the New England AntiSlavery Society in 1831. Two years later, he helped form the larger American Anti-Slavery Society. In 1833 he established ties with English abolitionists after a trip to Great Britain, and he later brought the noted and notorious speaker George Thompson to the United States for a tour. Ever the radical, Garrison expanded his interests to include women’s rights after female delegates were excluded from the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840. The issue of women’s participation in the antislavery movement and Garrison’s absolute refusal to turn to politics to end slavery caused a division in the American Anti-Slavery Society. Those who opposed women acting as speakers and who hoped to use politics to advance abolition formed the “New Organization.” Garrison’s ideas were so closely associated with the “Old Organization” that the group became known more frequently as the “Garrisonians.” With the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, Garrison believed that he had accomplished his life’s work and that of the antislavery movement. He then resigned from the presidency of the American Anti-Slavery Society and closed the Liberator. Wendell Phillips Garrison and Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805–1879: The Story of His Life Told by His Children, 4 vols. (New York, 1885-89); Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York, 1998); James Brewer Stewart, William Lloyd Garrison and the Challenge of Emancipation (Arlington Heights, Ill., 1992); John L. Thomas, The Liberator: William Lloyd Garrison (Boston, 1963); DAB, 7: 168–72.—and others—We shall all look funny appearing in Court against
Gerrit Smith!

ALS: Gerrit Smith Papers, NSyU.