FREDERICK DOUGLASS TO PHOTIUS FISK¹Photius Fisk (1807–1900) was born in Greece under the name Philipangos Kavasales. Orphaned, he was adopted by an American missionary who gave him his name. Fisk was educated at Amherst College and Auburn Theological Seminary, ordained a Congregational minister, and became a chaplain in the U.S. Navy. He became an abolitionist, freethinker, and active opponent of the flogging of seamen. After retiring from the navy in 1864, he became well known for his generosity toward the poor. Boston Daily Globe, 10 February 1890; Lyman F. Hodge, Photius Fisk: A Biography (Boston, 1891).

Washington, D.C.²Douglass added the following to his address: “United States Marshal’s Office.” 15 July 1878.

MY DEAR MR. FISK:

I am reminded by a letter from our valued friend, Parker Pillsbury,
that I have not yet written an answer to your letter inviting me to be present in Muskegon, Mich.,³Muskegon is a small city along Lake Michigan in northwestern Michigan. It became important as both a trading and manufacturing center in the nineteenth century. Seltzer, Columbia Lippincott Gazetteer, 1269. on the 1st of August, and assist at the unveiling
of the monument which you have nobly caused to be erected over the dust
of the late Jonathan Walker.⁴Jonathan Walker (1799–1878) was a northern abolitionist honored in antislavery circles for his efforts to help slaves in Florida escape. By turns a seaman, carpenter, and mechanic, Walker grew up on Cape Cod, converted to abolitionism sometime in the 1830s, and lived with his family in Pensacola, Florida, for five or six years before returning to Massachusetts. While on a business trip to Pensacola in the summer of 1844, he agreed to use his boat to transport some slaves to freedom in the Bahamas. The party was intercepted on the Florida Gulf Coast by two southern dredging boats. Walker was returned to Pensacola, where he was convicted of slave stealing, fined about $165, and branded on the palm of his right hand with the initials “SS” (slave stealer). He spent eleven months in jail before northern abolitionists secured his release by paying his fines and court and jail costs. Walker later toured as an abolitionist celebrity, making speeches and displaying his branded palm as evidence of southern barbarity. After two failed attempts at establishing utopian communities in Wisconsin, Walker settled in Muskegon, Michigan. Over five thousand people attended Walker’s burial in Evergreen Cemetery in Muskegon, Michigan, on 1 May 1878. On 1 August 1878, a monument with a bas-relief of Walker’s injured hand was dedicated at the grave site. Jonathan Walker, Trial and Imprisonment of Jonathan Walker (Boston, 1845); A Short Sketch of the Life and Services of Jonathan Walker, the Man with the Branded Hand (Muskegon, Mich., 1879), 2, 9–11; Louis Filler, The Crusade against Slavery, 1830–1860 (London, 1960), 164; ACAB, 6: 329. I deeply regret that my duties and appointments will compel me to decline your esteemed invitation.

Yes, I knew Jonathan Walker, and knew him well,—knew him to love
him, and to honor him as a true man, a friend to humanity, a brave but
noiseless lover of liberty, not only for himself but for all men; one who
possessed the qualities of a hero and martyr, and was ready to take any
risks to his own safety and personal ease to save his fellow-men from
slavery. It is meet and right that one who was such as he was should have
his grave marked as you propose. His name deserves remembrance, and
should be mentioned with those of John Brown, Charles T. Torrey,⁵Born in Massachusetts and educated at Yale, Charles Turner Torrey (1813–46) organized an antislavery society at Andover Theological Seminary while a student there. Later a Congregational minister, Torrey was one of the leaders of the anti-Garrisonian faction in Massachusetts and served as the agent of the Massachusetts Abolition Society and as the first editor of the Massachusetts Abolitionist. Torrey left that paper in 1841 to go to Washington, D.C., as a freelance reporter. In Annapolis, Maryland, the following year, he was arrested as an abolitionist while reporting on a “Convention of Slaveholders” and was acquitted after a brief trial. Returning north for a short while to edit the Albany Patriot, Torrey moved to Baltimore around 1843 to engage in business and carry out his scheme for transporting fugitive slaves to the free states along a prearranged route. It is said that in two years he helped about four hundred slaves from Maryland and Virginia escape. Arrested for this activity in 1844 and defended by Reverdy Johnson, Torrey was convicted and sentenced to six years’ hard labor. He died of tuberculosis in a Baltimore prison. J. C. Lovejoy, Memoir of Rev. Charles T. Torrey, Who Died in the Penitentiary of Maryland, Where He Was Confined for Showing Mercy to the Poor (Boston, 1847); Filler, Crusade against Slavery, 163–64; DAB, 18: 595–96. William L. Chaplin,⁶In August 1850, William L. Chaplin (1796–1871) was among a group arrested for aiding fugitive slaves. Originally a lawyer, Chaplin left his legal practice in Easton, Massachusetts, to devote himself to the abolitionist movement in New York in the 1830s. He worked for the Liberty party as a lecturer and editor and became an associate of Gerrit Smith. In 1850, Chaplin assisted a group of slaves who had escaped from the Georgia slave owners Alexander H. Stephens and Robert Toombs. Authorities arrested Chaplin and charged him with violating the Fugitive Slave Act in Washington, D.C., and Maryland. Three of Chaplin’s longtime New York abolitionist friends, James C. Jackson, Joseph C. Hathaway, and Theodosia Gilbert, rushed to Washington to attend to Chaplin’s needs while he was jailed. The Free Democrat congressman Joshua Giddings and Senator Salmon P. Chase aided in Chaplin’s legal defense. Opponents of the Fugitive Slave Act, led by Smith, rallied around the case and posted Chaplin’s $25,000 bond. Back in New York in 1851, Chaplin refused to return south for his trial and worked only briefly to raise funds to reimburse those who stood his bail. He drifted away from Gerrit Smith and, together with Jackson and Hathaway, moved into the Free Democratic camp. Chaplin later married Gilbert and joined Jackson in operating a water cure establishment in Glen Haven, New York. Wilson, Slave Power in America, 2: 80–82; Stanley Harrold, Subversives: Antislavery Community in Washington, D.C., 1826–1865 (Baton Rouge, La., 2003), 157–62; Lawrence J. Friedman, Gregarious Saints: Self and Community in American Abolitionism, 1830–1870 (New York, 1982), 123; Harlow, Gerrit Smith, 290–95; Lawrence J. Friedman, “The Gerrit Smith Circle: Abolitionism in the Burned-Over District,” Civil War History, 26: 19–37 (March 1980). Elijah P. Lovejoy,⁷Elijah Parish Lovejoy (1802–37) was killed at Alton, Illinois, on 7 November 1837 while defending his press from an antiabolitionist mob. The son of a Presbyterian minister from Albion, Maine, and a graduate of Waterville (now Colby) College, Lovejoy moved to St. Louis, Missouri, in 1827 to teach school and edit a Whig newspaper. Five years later he returned east to study at Princeton Theological Seminary. Licensed to preach by the Philadelphia presbytery in 1833, Lovejoy went back to Missouri to edit the St. Louis Observer, a Presbyterian weekly, and to champion gradual emancipation, temperance, and anti-Catholicism. In 1836, his outspokenness on these topics angered many Missourians, and he moved to Alton, Illinois, where prominent citizens welcomed him as “a pious religious editor.” By March 1837, Lovejoy had converted to “immediatism,” joined the American Anti-Slavery Society, and announced his intention to organize local and state abolitionist societies. Already troubled by a recent decline in the local economy, many of Alton’s leading men were frankly alarmed at the prospect of their town becoming a center of an organized antislavery movement. Agitated by fears of miscegenation, many prominent citizens organized mob violence to silence Lovejoy and his press, the Alton Observer, which was twice dismantled and thrown into the river. When Lovejoy and his supporters replaced the press for a third time, they resolved to protect it by armed force. Lovejoy was mortally wounded by rifle fire when he and another man rushed out of the stone warehouse where the press was being safeguarded to shoot a rioter attempting to set fire to the roof. Abolitionists enshrined Lovejoy as a martyr. On 7 December 1837, the Boston lawyer Wendell Phillips delivered an impassioned defense of Lovejoy’s actions at a packed public meeting in Faneuil Hall. That speech marked Phillips’s unqualified embrace of the abolitionist cause. John Gill, Tide without Turning: Elijah P. Lovejoy and Freedom of the Press (Boston, 1958); Merton L. Dillon, Elijah P. Lovejoy: Abolitionist Editor (Urbana, Ill., 1961); Stewart, Wendell Phillips, 58–63; Leonard L. Richards, “Gentlemen of Property and Standing”: Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America (New York, 1970), 100–11; Perry, Radical Abolitionism, 75; Mabee, Black Freedom, 38–50; DAB, 11: 434–36. Thompson, Work, and Barr,⁸Douglass refers to the case of Alanson Work (1799–1879), James E. Burr (1814–59), and George Thompson (?–1893), three seminary students from the Mission Institute in Quincy, Illinois, who were arrested, tried, and convicted in 1841 of assisting Missouri slaves to escape. Abolitionists organized a petition campaign that eventually won the three men’s freedom. New York Times, 8, 28 July 1879; Snodgrass, Underground Railroad, 1: 90; Olea Prinsloo, “Domestic Missionaries, Slaveholders, and Confronting the Morality of Slavery: Missouri v. James Burr, George Thompson, and Alanson Work, September, 1841,” Social Science and Missions, 26: 59–92 (2013). Calvin
Fairbanks,⁹Calvin Fairbank (1816–98) was a Methodist clergyman and celebrated abolitionist martyr who spent nearly seventeen years in jail in Kentucky for aiding in the escape of slaves. Born in Wyoming County, New York, Fairbank first helped in the flight of a slave while taking a raft of lumber down the Ohio River. Soon thereafter, he became a principal in the Underground Railroad, ferrying fugitives from Kentucky and Virginia to Ohio. While enrolled as a student at Oberlin, he was arrested in Kentucky for aiding the escape of Lewis Hayden. He received a fifteen-year sentence in 1845, but was pardoned by Governor John J. Crittenden in 1849. Fairbank soon resumed his Underground Railroad activities and was captured again in November 1851. Sentenced to another fifteen years in prison, he served until April 1864, during which time he was subjected to many beatings by his guards. Fairbank spent his postbellum years in Ohio, Virginia, and New York, hired by missionary and benevolent institutions to work among the freedpeople. NS, 14 September 1849; FDP, 20 November 1851; Baltimore Ledger, 5 November 1878; Calvin Fairbank, Rev. Calvin Fairbank during Slavery Times: How He “Fought the Good Fight” to Prepare “The Way” (Chicago, 1890); Wilbur H. Siebert, The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom (New York, 1898), 157–59, 236; Dwight Lowell Dumond, Antislavery: The Crusade for Freedom in America (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1961), 314; Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 149–50, 164; DAB, 6: 247. Abraham Lincoln, and other noble men who suffered at the
hands of the slave power. Jonathan Walker is not less entitled to grateful
memory than the most honored of them all. He was one who felt satisfied
with the applause of his own soul. What he attempted was not intended to
attract public notice. He was on the free, dashing billows of the Atlantic

when the voices of Nature spoke to his soul with the grandest emphasis of
love and truth; and, responsive to those voices, as well as to those of his
own heart, he welcomed the panting fugitives from slavery to the safety
of his deck,—though in doing so he exposed himself to stocks, prison,
branding irons, and it might have been to death. I well remember the sensation produced by the exhibition of his branded hand. It was one of the
few atrocities of slavery that roused the justice and humanity of the North
to a death struggle with slavery.

Looking into his simple, honest face, it was easy to see that on such
a countenance as his no trace of infamy could be made by stocks, stripes,
or branding irons. “S. S.” meant at the South, Slave Stealer, but was read
by the North and all civilized men everywhere as Slave Saviour. His example of self-sacrifice nerved us all to more heroic endeavor in behalf of
the slave.

My dear sir, I feel it a great deprivation that I cannot be personally
present with you on the 1st of August and assist in the ceremonies in honorable memory of true-hearted Jonathan Walker, but I shall be with you
in spirit and in purpose.

Very truly yours,

FRED’K DOUGLASS

PLSr: Lyman F. Hodge, (Boston, 1891), 149–51.