FREDERICK DOUGLASS TO JAMES D. LYNCH¹James D. Lynch (1839–1872) was born in Baltimore, Maryland, to a slave mother and a white merchant father. The Reverend Daniel Payne sent him to be educated in Philadelphia and then to schools in New Hampshire and Indiana. He entered the Methodist ministry and preached in Indiana and Illinois before being invited to settle in Philadelphia to edit the Christian Recorder. After missionary work among freedpeople in Georgia in 1864 and 1865, he returned to Philadelphia. In 1867, Lynch settled in Mississippi to resume missionary labors, but he soon entered Republican party politics there. In 1869, he launched a short-lived newspaper, the Jackson Colored Citizen, which adopted a moderate position on Reconstruction issues, hoping to strike a political alliance with some of the state’s whites. Lynch’s faction won control of the state party and elected him secretary of state in the fall of 1869. The Republican party hired Lynch to campaign nationwide for Grant’s reelection in 1872. He died shortly thereafter of complications from Bright’s disease. William C. Harris, “James Lynch: Black Leader in Southern Reconstruction,” Historian, 34: 40–61 (November 1971).

Rochester, N.Y. 13 August 1866.

FOR THE CHRISTIAN RECORDER

REV. JAMES LYNCH:—

MY DEAR SIR:—

You will, I trust, allow me publically to thank you, and to thank you with
some warmth and earnestness, for your Editorial Article on the history of
the Colored Men’s Shipyard in Baltimore.²Douglass probably alludes to an article describing the formation of the Chesapeake Marine Railway and Dry Dock Company, a racially integrated cooperative business, founded in Baltimore in February 1866 by Isaac Myers. Philadelphia Christian Recorder, 7 April 1866. I send you my heartiest amen
to all you say of the importance of industry, enterprise, and perseverance
in that admirable article. You have struck the key note. Follow up the
work. The success of the ship yard, born as that enterprise was in time of
trouble and in deep discouragement, cannot be otherwise than a powerful help morally, to the cause of our people, not only in Maryland and
Baltimore, but to the whole country. That shipyard speaks a language that
cannot be misunderstood. Every mallet there employed, and breaking into
the din of Fell’s Point³Fells Point, first settled by William Fell in 1726, was an enclave east of Baltimore center that was not annexed to Baltimore until 1773. This hooked piece of land, jutting into the outer harbor, was a shipbuilding site since the mid-eighteenth century. After the War of 1812, it was the construction site for the famous Baltimore clipper ships. By the time of Douglass’s arrival, Fells Point was a heavily populated neighborhood whose residents worked in shipbuilding and other maritime pursuits. Shipyards and wharves for unloading cargo lined its waterfront. J. Thomas Scharf, History of Baltimore City and County: From the Earliest Period to the Present Day (Philadelphia, 1881), 54, 59–60, 292–94; Sherry H. Olson, Baltimore (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), 52–53, 85. industry, is eloquent. With you, I accord all honor
to the brave colored calkers of Baltimore. Other men may be discouraged
by hardship, but these never. What a history has been theirs! I have known
these men for forty years.⁴Douglass was apprenticed as a ship’s caulker in William Gardiner’s Baltimore shipyard in 1836. This employment ended abruptly when Douglass was violently attacked by white shipyard workers at Gardiner’s wharf approximately eight months after he began working there. Hugh Auld then got Douglass a position at the nearby shipyard of Walter Price on the shoreline of Fells Point, where he completed his training. Douglass Papers, ser. 2, 3: 140–45; McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 58–63. Their trials and persecutions remain to be written. Heaven grant that now the material for such a history may cease. It is
a most shocking thought that men should be mobbed and beaten simply
for earning their bread in the sweat of their faces.⁵A paraphrase of Gen. 3:19. But a better day dawns.
Baltimore shall be released of this barbarism. Mad as we have seen her in
the past, shaking aloft a bloody hand, and scowling wrath on the unproprotected black mechanic and laborer, we shall yet see her at the feet of
Eternal Justice, clothed in her right mind, and rejoicing in the ennobling
idea that all rights are for all.

I hope you will follow up the ideas you have forcibly expressed in the
Shipyard article.

Your friend,

FREDERICK DOUGLASS

PLSr: Philadelphia , 25 August 1866.