FREDERICK DOUGLASS TO THEODORE TILTON

Washington[, D.C.] 10 April 1871.

MY DEAR TILTON:

You are anticipated: The Golden Age has already been duly advertised in
three numbers of the Era.¹In late 1870, the New York businessman Henry Bowen, owner of the New York Independent, fired Theodore Tilton from the paper’s editorship because of Tilton’s support for the early stages of the Liberal Republican revolt against Ulysses S. Grant, as well as for Tilton’s endorsements of divorce reform and women’s rights. The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher then secretly bankrolled a new weekly, the Golden Age, for Tilton to edit, perhaps to keep him from spreading rumors about the minister’s alleged affair with Tilton’s wife, Elizabeth. Tilton used his new journalistic vehicle to champion “free love,” spiritualism, and divorce. He publicly defended the controversial Victoria Woodhull, with whom many critics believed he was having an affair. The Golden Age failed to attract a large readership, and it alienated many of Tilton’s old friends by endorsing Horace Greeley’s 1872 presidential bid as both the Liberal Republican and Democratic candidate. The newspaper was closed in 1874. Altina Laura Waller, Reverend Beecher and Mrs. Tilton: Sex and Class in Victorian America (Amherst, Mass., 1982), 88–92, 135–38; Fox, Trials of Intimacy, 148–57; Shaplen, Free Love and Heavenly Sinners, 109.

You have only to command me.

I cannot tell you how delighted I was to find you again in the field.
The battle with error superstition and all manner of bigotry needs your
arm—and I could not bear to have it broken or paralyzed for an hour.

The Golden Age is a perfect Gem of Typographical neatness and elegance. It comes forth like a bride adorned for her husband. Let no wrong
stand in its shining path. Let the Golden Age flourish. Let it shame malice, silence fury, crush meanness—and hasten on that true golden Age
which is first pure, then peaceble without partiality and without hypocrisy.

I am your friend always

FREDK DOUG LASS

[P.S.] Please remember me most kindly to Dear Mrs Tilton—and your
precious children.²At this time, Theodore and Elizabeth Tilton were attempting to hold their marriage together following her confession of an earlier affair with the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher. Fox, Trials of Intimacy, 136–37, 154, 175–77.

ALS: Autographs, NNPML.