FREDERICK DOUGLASS TO W. SCOTT SMITH¹The correspondent is Winfield Scott Smith (1847–1919), the longtime Washington, D.C., reporter for the New York Evening Post. Born in Batavia, Ohio, he achieved some notoriety for publishing rumors of bribery of American congressmen by Cuban revolutionaries in 1870. When called to testify before a House investigating committee, Smith refused to divulge his sources, and the effort to censure him was then tabled. He later purchased a home in the LeDroit Park development, which was built on land sold by Howard University to recover from a financial crisis in the mid-1870s. “U.S., City Directories, 1822–1995”; 1880 U.S. Census, District of Columbia, Washington, 7; 1910 U.S. Census, District of Columbia, Washington, 89A; “Libelous Statements and Publications as to Members of the House of Representatives—Cuban Bond Lobby,” in U.S. Congress, Digests of Decisions and Precedents of the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States (Washington, D.C., 1894), 505–12; LeDroit Park Historic District, “National Register of Historic Places—Nomination Form,” planning.dc.gov; Find a Grave (online).

Washington, D.C. 22 June [1875.]

DEAR SIR:

I have duly received your note of to day making sundry inquiries as to the
future management of Howard University;²Congress incorporated Howard University—named for the Freedmen’s Bureau commissioner Oliver Otis Howard—in 1867 to help meet the educational needs of blacks moving to the District of Columbia. Although its faculty was racially mixed, whites filled the top administrative posts well into the twentieth century. At the time of this letter, the university carried a devastating $100,000 deficit, and its board of trustees initiated a program of retrenchment that involved significant cuts in expenses, personnel, and salaries. Press reports at the time speculated that “the institution is to be conducted in the immediate interest of the Congregation Church.” Washington , 18 June 1874; Holmes, “Fifty Years of Howard University.” as to whether that institution
is to be conducted on the same basis in the future as in the past, or whether
it passed under the control of the American Missionary Association or
the Congregationalists, and also asking me to define my own position
in regard to Howard University in the future. In reply to these inquiries
I beg to state that, as I understand it, no organic change has taken place
in the instituiion; ostensibly, at least it is the same institution it ever was.
There have been no changes in the Board of Trustees; its members are the
same as when General Howard³Oliver Otis Howard was president of Howard University from 1869 to 1874. was the President of the University.⁴Douglass is correct that no new members joined the Board of Howard University between 1874 and 1878. At
the recent meeting of the Board of Trustees⁵The most recent meeting of the Howard University Board of Trustees occurred on 16 June 1875. Logan, Howard University, 76. there was no declaration of
purpose to manage the University either in the interest of the American
Missionary Association nor in that of the Congregationalists.

There was a purpose declared to curtail the expenses of the Institution, and power was given to the Executive Committee to bring these expenses within the income of the Institution[.]⁶John Mercer Langston reported that Howard University’s financial problems were handed over to a five-member executive committee to resolve, three of whom were members of the District’s First Congregational Church. The committee renegotiated the university’s debts, sold off some of its local landholdings, and cut salaries and programs, including the School of Law, where Langston was also dean. Logan, Howard University, 78–81. This Executive Committee
is composed of two white gentlemen and one colored. The Board of Trustees also elected the Rev. George Whipple,⁷Born in Albany, New York, George Whipple (1805–75) studied at the Oneida Institute before enrolling in Cincinnati’s Lane Seminary, which was under the direction of the Reverend Lyman Beecher. He was one of the “Lane Rebels” who left the school because it censored antislavery views. He finished his training as a Congregationalist minister at the seminary at Oberlin College. He stayed to teach mathematics at Oberlin before becoming the corresponding secretary of the American Missionary Association and an executive committee member of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. General Catalogue of Oberlin College, 1833–1908 (Oberlin, Ohio, 1909), 181; McKivigan, War against Proslavery Religion, 77, 114. the veteran Secretary of the
American Missionary Association, as President of Howard University.
This was done in the face of the earnestly expressed desire of the colored
members of the Board that the position should be given to a colored man.⁸General Oliver Otis Howard submitted his resignation as Howard University’s president in December 1874. The fifteen-member board of trustees voted for a new president on 16 June 1875. George Whipple received ten votes; the university’s vice president and acting president John Mercer Langston received four; and Douglass received one. Historians believe that Langston received the votes of all four African Americans on the board, including Douglass, and one white, perhaps Whipple, had voted for Douglass. Protests by African Americans in the press and in speeches, such as the ones both Douglass and Langston delivered on 5 July 1875, helped persuade Whipple to decline his selection. Langston also resigned his posts at the university. The trustees then selected the Congregational minister Edward Parmelee Smith as president. Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 4: 414–22; New York Evening Post, 24, 26 June 1876; Washington National Republican, 8 July 1875; New York Times, 7 July 1875; Walter Dyson, Howard University: A History, 1867–1940 (Washington, 1941), 56–57; Logan, Howard University, 74–81.

While, as I have said, there was no declaration of purpose to change
the character of Howard University, or to make it in any measure a mere
tender to either the American Missionary Association or to the Congregationalists, I will not deny that the colored members of the Board thought
they saw in the election of Mr. Whipple, and in the influence by which he
was elected, a tendency in those directions.

The fact that this election seemed a foregone conclusion, and the
members promoting it being all of the Congregational and the American
Missionary Association persuasions, serve to confirm this apprehension.
Howard University, as the public are generally aware, was built by General Howard while Commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau, with moneys
derived from unclaimed bounties due colored soldiers killed in the service
of their country[.] It was designed to afford the means of a classical education to the colored youth of the country, and of course was not intended by
any means, to be either sectarian in character or in management. With the
history of the Freedmen’s Bank before them an institution which afforded
a set of hungry sharks, with professions of piety upon their lips, the opportunity to rob the freedmen of their hard earnings, the colored trustees of
the University may be pardoned for being a little suspicious of having the
University pass into the exclusive control of any religious organization.
Howard University to day owns property to the amount of nearly a million dollars,⁹Howard University’s land acquisition in the District of Columbia began with the purchase of a 150-acre farm from a John A. Smith in June 1867. The university disposed of portions of its land to remain solvent during difficult economic periods. Logan, Howard University, 27–28, 90. and the control of the institution, even in respect to this vast
sum, is not undesirable, and, since it is money drawn from the blood of
colored soldiers, it was not unreasonable that colored men desired a voice
in its management. As to what shall be my individual course in respect to
Howard University hereafter, it is needless here to declare.

Respectfully, etc.

[SIGNED] FREDERICK DOUGLASS.

PLSr: Philadelphia , 1 July 1875.