FREDERICK DOUGLASS TO PHILIP A. BELL¹Philip A. Bell (1808–89) was educated at the New York City Free School and worked as an agent for the Liberator and at a variety of other occupations in his youth. He was secretary of a January 1831 public meeting of New York blacks that protested against the colonization movement. In 1837, Bell helped found and edit the Weekly Advocate, later renamed the New York Colored American, which was an important forum for black opinion until ceasing publication in 1842. In the 1850s he operated an employment agency for New York City blacks and was active in literary, temperance, and mutual relief societies as well as in the antislavery movement. Bell attended many of the antebellum National Negro Conventions and lectured for equal suffrage for blacks. After moving to California in 1860, Bell briefly ran a real estate agency before returning to journalism, first as associate editor of the San Francisco Pacific Appeal and later as owner and editor of the San Francisco Elevator. In the 1870s, Bell was president of the Equal Rights League of California, a politically independent group that lobbied Republican politicians for better treatment of blacks. New York Colored American, 8 December 1838; San Francisco Elevator, 12 June 1868, 11 January, 15 November 1873; William Lloyd Garrison, Thoughts on African Colonization; or, an Impartial Exhibition of the Doctrines, Principles and Purposes of the American Colonization Society (New York, 1832), 13–17; I. Garland Penn, The Afro-American Press and Its Editors (1891; Salem, N.H., 1988), 32–34, 94–98; Robert C. Dick, Black Protest: Issues and Tactics (Westport, Conn., 1974), 84, 173–77, 267; Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 20, 31, 95; Pease and Pease, They Who Would Be Free, 113–14, 175, 195, 210; James A. Fisher, “A History of the Political and Social Development of the Black Community in California, 1850–1950” (Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1971), 72–75, 97–100, 140–46; Freeman, “Free Negro in New York City,” 35, 46, 128, 175–76, 237, 299.

Rochester, N[.]Y. 28 April 1868.

PHILLIP A. BELL, ESQ.

MY DEAR SIR:—

I have just read in THE ELEVATOR²The Elevator was an African American newspaper edited from San Francisco by Philip A. Bell, beginning 18 April 1865. The newspaper, priced at fifteen cents an issue, consisted of four seven-column pages and was published every Friday. Established for the promotion of blacks, it advocated inclusion in—not separation from—American civic and social life. In addition to civil liberties and political discussion, the Elevator was widely known for covering science, drama, and literature. Bell had twenty-five years of editorial experience at the time he founded the Elevator, including stints at the Colored American and the Pacific Appeal. By the 1880s, the Elevator had become the longest-running black newspaper of the nineteenth century. It ceased with Bell’s death on 24 April 1889. Penn, Afro-American Press, 94, 95; EAAH, 1: 123–24. your remarks on the close of your third
volume. Your three years history calls to mind my own trying experiene of

sixteen years.³Douglass edited a series of newspapers in Rochester, New York: the North Star (1847–51), Frederick Douglass’ Paper (1851–61), and Douglass’ Monthly (1859–63). All struggled financially, since paying subscribers proved hard to recruit and retain. Patrick S. Washburn, The African American Newspaper: Voice of Freedom (Evanston, Ill., 2006), 34–36. For this length of time, sustained mainly by a few friends,
I, like yourself, endeavored to serve the cause of my people through the
agency of the Press. I cannot boast that I served them with any great ability, but I can say I served them faithfully, and could have served them
more ably and effectually had they supplied the needful money to keep
my paper free from debt, and my mind free from the grinding anxiety
incident to being in debt. I regret to see that you, away off in the Golden
State,⁴By the 1860s, California was being widely referred to as the “Golden State,” which became the state’s official nickname in 1968 (appearing also on license plates). The nickname derives from the discovery of gold there in 1848, which spurred California’s modern development. George Earlie Shankle, State Names, Flags, Seals, Songs, Birds, Flowers, and Other Symbols, rev. ed. (New York, 1941), 103–04. are suffering in the same way. You have enough who will praise
you, but few who will pay you. I don’t know what you think of this matter, but I think there is little hope for us in this country or in any other, no
matter how favorable may be the conditions, while we, as a people, fail to
appreciate the power of the Press, and to stand by our advocates. When we
have once educated our people to this duty and privilege, we have already
achieved success.

I am glad to see you still battling bravely and hopefully to this end. I
remember, with pleasure, my first knowledge of you. It was gained from
the ,⁵Begun as the Weekly Advocate in January 1837 by Philip A. Bell and Robert Sear, a white printer, this New York City newspaper focused on abolitionism and moral reform subjects. Samuel Cornish became its editor in March 1837, renaming it the Colored American and emphasizing the concerns of northern free blacks. The paper frequently changed owners and editors over its short life, finally ceasing operations in December 1841. Donald M. Jacobs, Antebellum Black Newspapers (Westport, Conn., 1976), 207, 229–30, 451–54; C. Peter Ripley, ed., The Black Abolitionist Papers, 5 vols. (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1985–92), 3: 217–18. thirty years ago—the first publication by colored
men I ever saw—and you were one of its editors. I cannot tell—no living
man can tell—what of joy and hope I felt when, newly from slavery, I
looked for the first time upon the . “Can this be true?”
thought I. “Is this really the work of colored men?” Slavery and slander
had done their work. They had made me doubt the ability of my race. I
could not wholly believe, at first, that the articles I found in the paper were
written by colored men. Meeting with such men as Dr. David Ruggles,⁶David Ruggles (1810–49), a free black man, was born and educated in Norwich, Connecticut. In 1827 he moved to New York, where he worked as a grocer. In 1834 he opened a print shop and bookstore that specialized in abolitionist literature. Ruggles became active in the New York antislavery movement, serving as a writer, lecturer, and traveling agent for the reform publication Emancipator and Journal of Public Morals. He was also a conductor on the Underground Railroad; editor of two abolitionist newspapers, the Genius of Freedom and the Mirror of Liberty; and secretary of the New York Vigilance Committee. His career in the antislavery movement ended abruptly in 1842 when temporary blindness, an illness that would plague him for the remainder of his life, forced him to curtail his activities and seek medical attention. At the Northampton Association of Education and Industry in Florence, Massachusetts, he underwent hydrotherapy, which temporarily relieved his blindness. Soon thereafter, he began a new career as a hydrotherapist in Northampton, Massachusetts, treating such celebrated individuals as Sojourner Truth and William Lloyd Garrison. His reputation as a hydrotherapist gave him a prominence that rivaled his stature as an abolitionist. NASS, 20 December 1849; Lib., 21 December 1849; New York Evangelist, 27 December 1849; Salem, Ohio, Anti-Slavery Bugle, 29 December 1849; NS, 1 February 1850; Penn, Afro-American Press, 118; DANB, 536–38.
Dr. Brown,⁷William Wells Brown (c. 1814–84) was born a slave in Lexington, Kentucky, but escaped to freedom in Ohio in 1834. After settling in Cleveland, he worked on a Lake Erie steamboat, which enabled him to help many fugitive slaves escape to Canada. In the 1840s he and his family moved to New York state, where he began lecturing for the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society and the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society (1843–49). In 1847, Brown published his first book, Narrative of William W. Brown, A Fugitive Slave, Written by Himself, and moved to Boston. From 1849 to 1854 he traveled as a lecturer in Europe, meeting many prominent figures and continuing his career as an author with Three Years in Europe; Or, Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met (1852) and Clotel; Or, The President’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States (1853), the first novel known to be published by an African American. After friends in England purchased his freedom in 1854, he returned to the United States to continue his work in the abolitionist, temperance, woman suffrage, and prison reform movements. He also wrote four books about African American history. During the Civil War, Brown joined Douglass in recruiting blacks for the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry Regiment. Lib., 12 January 1855; London Lancet, 6 December 1884; DAB, 3: 161; DANB, 71–73. William P. Johnson,⁸An elder in New York City’s First Colored Presbyterian Church and a shoemaker by trade, William P. Johnson wrote frequently for the Colored American, often describing visits to free black communities in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware. He was active in local and state black conventions in the 1840s and helped David Ruggles with vigilance committee work. Henry H. Garnet, A Memorial Discourse (Philadelphia, 1865), 42; Philip S. Foner and George E. Walker, Proceedings of the Black State Conventions, 1840–1865, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1979), 1:5–6, 33–34; Jacobs, Antebellum Black Newspapers, 401–02. Samuel Cornish,⁹Samuel E. Cornish (c. 1795–1859), a black Presbyterian minister, helped found the First Colored Presbyterian Church of New York in 1822. In 1827, Cornish was coeditor, with John Russwurm, of Freedom’s Journal, the first black newspaper in the United States. Resigning the editorship after only six months, Cornish then served as an agent for the New York Manumission Society’s African Free Schools. In 1829 he started his own abolitionist newspaper, Rights of All, which failed in less than a year. Between 1837 and 1839, Cornish edited the Colored American and later served as pastor of the black Presbyterian church in Newark, New Jersey. Walter M. Merrill and Louis Ruchames, eds., The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, 6 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1971–81), 6: 328n; Frankie Hutton, The Early Black Press in America, 1827 to 1860 (Westport, Conn., 1993), 6–9. Theodore S. Wright,¹⁰Theodore Sedgwick Wright (1797–1847)—clergyman, abolitionist, and reformer—worked tirelessly to aid fellow African Americans. He was a founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833 and the anti-Garrisonian American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in 1840. In the 1830s, Wright lectured for the New England Anti-Slavery Society, delivering important speeches against prejudice and colonization in front of the New York State Anti-Slavery Society in 1837. Wright also served on the executive committees of the Union Missionary Association and the American Missionary Association, organizations that sent missionaries to Africa. In 1844, Wright supported the Liberty party and served on the committee to choose its presidential and vice presidential candidates. A dedicated reformer, Wright pursued temperance, sought voting rights for African Americans in New York, supported education for blacks, and chaired the New York Vigilance Committee, a group organized to aid fugitive slaves and protect free blacks from kidnapping. New York Evangelist, 1 April 1847; Washington National Era, 8 April 1848; Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 45–46, 68, 80, 171–72, 184–85; DANB, 675–76.
Dr. James McCune Smith,¹¹The son of a slave father and a self-emancipated bondswoman, James McCune Smith (1813– 65) was born in New York City, where he attended the New York African Free School. Denied admission to American medical schools, Smith sailed to Scotland in 1832, receiving his B.A. (1835), M.A. (1836), and M.D. (1837) from the University of Glasgow. Upon his return to New York City, Smith set up a medical practice and pharmacy that catered to blacks and whites. He also devoted himself to abolitionist concerns. Smith briefly served as an associate editor of the Colored American in 1839 and contributed regularly to the Anglo-African Magazine and, under the pseudonym “Communipaw,” to the North Star and Frederick Douglass’ Paper. A longtime opponent of black colonization and emigration, he helped finance the revival of the Weekly Anglo-African as an antiemigrationist organ in 1861. In 1863, Smith was appointed professor of anthropology at Wilberforce College, but illness kept him from his post. Lib., 1 June 1838; FDP, 18 May 1855; Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 115, 134; Pease and Pease, They Who Would Be Free, 90–92, 103, 110; David W. Blight, “In Search of Learning, Liberty, and Self-Definition: James McCune Smith and the Ordeal of the Antebellum Black Intellectual,” Afro-Americans in New York Life and History, 9: 7–25 (July 1985); Freeman, “Free Negro in New York City,” 40–42, 177, 186, 195, 200, 247, 276, 286, 325, 353, 393; DAB, 27: 288–89. and hearing their conversation, brushed the
scales from my eyes, and opened a new world of possibilities to my view.

Since that time I have never entirely lost sight of Philip A. Bell, nor
lost faith in the future of our people. Tried and true friend of our common
cause, among the first of our race to assail with your pen (mightier than
the sword) the malignant ramparts of slavery and caste, having survived
so many of your early associates, and witnessed the overthrow of slavery,
may it also be yours to see the blackman made equal before the law, and
our people enfranchised, from the Lakes to the Gulf and from sea to sea!
If any word of mine can avail anything, I earnestly exhort your readers
and friends to stand by you and your paper till this great work is accomplished. I know your proud spirit, and your unwillingness to ask anything
for your own sake, but upon reading your reflections upon the close of
your third volume, I could not well help sending you a word of cheer in

the good work to which you are devoting your talents. Our cause is one the
country over, and a victory over the forces marshaled against us in California is a victory for our cause in our whole country, and everywhere else.

Yours truly,

FREDERICK DOUG LASS.

PLSr: San Francisco , 5 June 1868.