FREDERICK DOUGLASS TO RICHARD J. HINTON¹London-born Richard J. Hinton (1830–1901) had learned the stonecutter trade in his native country but decided to seek greater educational and economic opportunity in the United States in 1851. He became a printer and then a reporter for newspapers in New York City and Boston. Opposed to slavery, Hinton traveled to the Kansas Territory, where he reported sympathetically on the free-state cause. He served as an officer of a black Union army regiment in the Civil War and then as an inspector for the Freedmen’s Bureau. Hinton held a series of minor federal government appointments in later decades, but he devoted considerable energy to researching and writing John Brown and His Men: With Some Account of the Roads They Traveled to Reach Harper’s Ferry (1894), which warmly defended its subject. He also wrote on behalf of the labor movement and campaigned for Henry George for New York City mayor in 1886. Hinton had befriended a fellow English expatriate named Richard Realf in Kansas, whose poetry he collected and published, along with a short memoir, in Poems by Richard Realf: Poet, Soldier, Workman (1898). McKivigan, Forgotten Firebrand, 80, 174; Merrill and Ruchames, Garrison Letters, 5: 63; William E. Connelley, “Col. Richard J. Hinton,” Transactions of the Kansas State Historical Society, 1901–1902, 7: 486–93 (1902).

Wash[ington, D.C.] 20 Feb[ruar]y 1879.

MY DEAR HINTON:

Richard Realf²A follower of John Brown, Richard Realf (1832–78) was born in Framfield, East Sussex, England, and immigrated to the United States in 1854. He traveled to the Kansas Territory in 1856, where he briefly worked as a reporter for several East Coast newspapers. Realf accompanied Brown to Canada in an effort to recruit free blacks for the proposed raid on the South. When Brown’s raid was postponed, Realf returned to England and then went to Texas, where he was arrested at the time of the Harpers Ferry raid in October 1859. After being questioned by federal authorities about his role in Brown’s plot, Realf was eventually released. He served in the Civil War and became an officer of a black regiment after the war. He resigned from the army in 1870 and became a journalist in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A talented poet, Realf named Hinton his literary executor at the time of his suicide in Oakland, California, where he had moved after a divorce. Appleton’s Annual Cyclopedia and Annual Register of Important Events of the Year 1899 (New York, 1900), 202, 431; ANB (online). is about the only man of John Brown’s men that I do not
know something about. I have it is true, heard Capt Brown speak of Realf—
as an able and brave man—but I never saw him. You are mistaken about
my attending the John Brown Convention at Chatham. Captain Brown left

my house in Rochester³John Brown resided at Douglass’s Rochester house for three weeks beginning on 27 January 1858. Douglass Papers, ser. 2, 3: 236, 824–25. to attend that convention and warmly urged me
to go—but I could not see the wisdom of that measure. It seemed to me a
means of advertising our plans in advance. Conventions did not seem just
the place to put an important secret for safe keeping.

I shall be very glad to see your face once more—Come round to the
City Hall

Very truly yours

FREDK DOUGLASS

ALS: James Eldridge Manuscripts, Henry E. Huntington Library.