FREDERICK DOUGLASS TO GERRIT SMITH

Washington, D.C. 26 Sept[ember] 1873.

VENERATED FRIEND:

It did my heart good to see and read your note to me, and your printed
letter to Miss Anthony.¹Gerrit Smith wrote to Susan B. Anthony on 5 February 1873 to express disgust that she had been arrested for voting. Smith declared that women have a natural right to the vote and that male “tyrants” were prohibiting its exercise. Smith sent Anthony $100 to pay her fine, which she declined to do. Smith told her to use the money for whatever she wished. Smith issued a public circular on the question, addressed to Anthony, on 15 August 1873. Gerrit Smith to Susan B. Anthony, 5 February 1873, Gerrit Smith Papers, NSyU; Gerrit Smith, “Woman Suffrage above Human Law” (Peterboro, N.Y., 1873). They told me how grandly you yet live, think and
write. General Howard²O. O. Howard. gave me an interesting account of his visit to you.
He was greatly pleased. He is a great and good man and is doing a great
and good work here. But he has too much work to do—that is, more than
he can do. His presence is very much needed at the University³Congress incorporated Howard University, named for the Freedmen’s Bureau commissioner Oliver Otis Howard, in 1867 to help meet the educational needs of blacks settling in the District of Columbia. Although its faculty was mixed, whites filled the top administrative posts well into the twentieth century. Frederick Douglass joined Howard’s board of trustees in June 1871 and served continuously until his death. Howard awarded Douglass an honorary LL.D. degree at the first commencement of its collegiate department on 11 June 1871. Henry D. Cooke, the territorial governor of the District of Columbia, presented the degree to Douglass and lauded him as the “silvery tongued orator of America.” By 1875, the university was carrying a devastating $100,000 deficit, and the board initiated a program of retrenchment that involved significant cuts in expenses, personnel, and salaries. Douglass was proposed as a candidate for the Howard presidency during this period of crisis. He served the university as a fund-raiser and as a public advocate on its behalf to Congress and the public. He also made numerous addresses at the university over the years at both official and unofficial functions. Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 4: xxxvi, xxxii, 305, 5: 170–71, 636; NNE, 13, 20 June 1872; Logan, Howard University, 61, 64, 71, 75–78, 82–83, 177; Dwight O. W. Holmes, “Fifty Years of Howard University,” JNH, 3: 128–38, 368–80 (April, October 1918). and is
equally needed abroad to procure the needed support of the Institution.⁴In the summer of 1873, a controversy surfaced in the Washington press concerning the Howard University Board of Trustees voting to give special financial compensation to General Howard. Douglass had presided over a special committee that approved back pay of over $13,000 to Howard, forcing the university to cut the salaries of its professors. The criticism that Howard received caused him to request that the army return him to active service, which would force him to resign as the school’s president. To provide leadership to the university in case Howard departed, the trustees elected John M. Langston, a law professor, as vice president in December 1873. Logan, Howard University, 61–62, 73; Muller, Lion of Anacostia, 115–17.
He cannot be here and there at the same time and the trouble is to find the
right man to preside over the University when he is absent as he must be
for several months to come. When the question was up yesterday before
Board of Trustees, I ventured to say that I knew of no man who could
fill General Howards place, but Gerrit Smith. If you could reside here
for a few months and preside over this University in the absence of General Howard, it would be the Crowning position of your life and the most
powerful aid you could render to the Institution itself. I have faith in your
presence. You would only have to visit the different departments to defuse
your influence—the influence they so much need. Of course, in view of
your age and duties at home, I cannot urge this new work upon you, but
I want you to know the thought that is passing here concerning you. The
suggestion was received with emphatic approval on all sides.

I am not sure that my boys will be able to continue the “Era.” I have
put about ten thousand dollars into the concern⁵In his autobiography Life and Times, Douglass describes the New National Era as a “misadventure . . . which cost me from nine to ten thousand dollars, over it I have no tears to shed. The journal was valuable while it lasted, and the experiment was full of instruction to me, which to some extent has been heeded, for I have kept well out of newspaper undertakings since.” Douglass Papers, ser. 2, 3: 313.—and have given it over
to them entirely. They have formed a stock company and the paper is under their management.

The trouble of supporting the paper is twofold. First the negro is not
yet a reader: Secondly he is unconscious of having an associate existence
or common cause. All the social forces drive us asunder. Our confidence
is in the white race. White schools, white churches, white Theology,
white Legislators white public journals, secure our highest confidence
and support. Our women powder their faces and buy the hair of the white
race to make themselves more acceptable or less objectionable to the
white race. Nor is this strange. The honor, the power, the wisdom, wealth
and the glory are all with the white race. Large bodies attract small. I
found myself better appreciated by the whites than by my own people
at Nashville—and much of the attention paid me by the colored people
was due to the respect paid me by the whites.⁶Douglass appeared at the third annual fair of the Tennessee Colored Agricultural and Mechanical Association in Nashville on 18 September 1873. As many as five thousand people listened to Douglass’s address in the fairground’s auditorium. Newspaper reports confirm Douglass’s complaint that his audience grew inattentive and restless during his long oration. He was better received the next day by an audience of two thousand at the fair’s exhibition building, where he delivered his well-practiced “Self-Made Men” lecture. Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 4: 375–94; Nashville Republican Banner, 20, 21 September 1873; Nashville Union and American, 20, 21 September 1873; NNE, 2 October 1873. It is with us as it once was
with American authorship: no American writer was considered great at
home till he was confessed to be great abroad. No black man is worthy
of consideration in the eyes of his race, till he has gained consideration in
the eyes of yours. I make no complaint. I accept the inevitable and shall
cheerfully work on to raise my people to a higher plane of life—whether
the road shall be by disintegration or combination. Pardon me for so long
a note.

Always yours with love and veneration

FREDERICK DOUGLASS

ALS: Gerrit Smith Papers, NSyU.