JAMES H. MAYO¹James Henry Mayo (1834–1915), a prosperous Boston coal merchant, resided in Brookline, Massachusetts, throughout the 1870s and 1880s. The son of Dr. James Laha Mayo and Laura Ann Snow, he was a descendant of several prominent colonial Massachusetts families, some of whose ancestors arrived on the Mayflower. 1880 U.S. Census, Massachusetts, Norfolk County, 65; Susan E. Roser, Mayflower Births and Deaths: From the Files of George Ernest Bowman at the Massachusetts Society of Mayflower Descendants, 2 vols. (Baltimore, Md., 1992), 1: 243. TO FREDERICK DOUGLASS
Boston, [Mass.]²Mayo added additional address information after his signature: “116 Freemont St.” 30 March 1877.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS EQ

DEAR SIR

It gives me pleasure to congratulate you upon your acsession to a seat in
the synagogue, and to read in it the moral to our much written story—The
hunted has become the hunter.³The phrase “the hunter becomes the hunted” likely has origins in Greek mythology. Actaeon, a great hunter, was transformed into a stag by the goddess Artemis and then pursued and torn apart by his own hunting dogs. (His transgression was to have inadvertently seen her naked while bathing.) Mayo is pointing to the fact that the U.S. Marshal Service, once used to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, now included Douglass, the most famous of all fugitive slaves, in its ranks. Frederick S. Calhoun, The Lawmen: United States Marshals and Their Deputies, 1789–1989 (Washington, D.C., 1989), 76–77, 82–93. If it should happen to your lot to adjust a
few coals of fire upon the head of your former proprietor⁴As the new U.S. marshal for the District of Columbia, Douglass replaced Dr. Alexander Sharp (1825–1901), the brother-in-law of President Ulysses S. Grant. Sharp was married to Ellen (Nellie) Dent, the sister of Julia Dent Grant. During the 1850s, Sharp was a physician in the St. Louis area, where he met and married Nellie and befriended the Grants. During the Civil War, he served as a Union army surgeon. Sharp held the prestigious U.S. marshal position through the entire eight years of the Grant administration; in the mid-1870s he was accused in the press of corruption. In January 1877, Grant appointed Sharp paymaster for the U.S. Army, a post that he held until his retirement in 1889. Here, Mayo seems to imply that Sharp was the epitome of the nepotism and corruption charged to Grant’s presidency by his critics. Modern reevaluations of the Grant administration consider claims of its ineptitude and corruption to be overblown. Washington National Republican, 28 April 1869, 27 January 1877; Brooklyn (N.Y.) Daily Eagle, 14 June 1872; New York Sun, 5 June 1874, 28 May, 10 June 1876; New York Times, 12 January 1877; Calhoun, Presidency of Grant, 1–7, 587–93. the inversion
would be complete.

What I want now, is, the opinion of the U.S. Marshall on the sanity of
our friend of the “Lost Arts”.⁵Mayo refers to his fellow Bostonian Wendell Phillips and his famous lecture “The Lost Arts.” Although Phillips is largely remembered as a significant abolitionist orator and agitator, he made his living primarily as a celebrated lyceum speaker, giving lectures on a wide range of entertaining and educational topics. First delivered in 1838, “The Lost Arts” was wildly popular and therefore presented hundreds of times over many decades. Various forms of it, including satirical versions, were printed by American newspapers almost continually throughout Phillips’s lifetime. Its thesis was that the people of the nineteenth century should not be proud of scientific achievements of the time, since past ages had mastered material arts that could be neither rivaled nor revived. The lecture always had detractors in the scientific community, and by the twentieth century, it was largely dismissed as either pseudoscience or nostalgia for a mythical past. If anything, the talk was an artful piece of propaganda. According to Phillips, the “lost arts” were lost because aristocrats had monopolized them for their exclusive benefit; in the modern, democratic age, the dismantling of aristocracy had led to discoveries being applied for the benefit of all. In short, the lecture was a class-based attack on aristocracy, whether southern slaveholders or northern capitalists, without ever directly mentioning them. Wendell Phillips, The Lost Arts (Boston, 1892); Evansville (Ind.) Journal, 16 March 1870; Stewart, Wendell Phillips, 180–83; W. D. Richardson, “The Lost Arts of Chemistry,” Science, 33: 513–20 (7 April 1911). I think he should be entitled to all the light
shown upon his truthfull nature & his christianlike charitable solicitude

for the good of the nation, and his fostering tenderness of the sprouting
buds of goodness just now putting forth—as more fully set forth in his
little love story at Philadelphia recently[.]⁶Mayo sarcastically refers to the speech that Wendell Phillips delivered in Philadelphia on 27 March 1877, in which he attacked President Rutherford B. Hayes and most of his cabinet members. Phillips employed his considerable rhetorical skills to castigate the new president for attempting to conciliate the South by removing federal troops and appointing conservative Republicans who were determined to dismantle southern Reconstruction policies. The address was widely condemned by the press of both parties for its spiteful tone, but its forecast of the rapid demise of Reconstruction proved accurate. New York Herald, 27, 28 March 1877; New York Daily Tribune, 28 March 1877. What you think of him?

Every word of Mr Gaffields Criticism on his “Lost Arts”⁷Thomas Gaffield (1825–1900) was a wealthy Boston glass merchant and manufacturer, a partner in the firm Tuttle, Gaffield and Company (1847–69) who helped form the Boston Crystal Glass Works in 1861. Interested in using advances in scientific knowledge to improve glassmaking processes, Gaffield toured Europe in the early 1860s, where he amassed copious research notes, books, and artifacts related to making and using glass. After retiring in 1869 at the age of forty-four, he devoted the rest of his life to real estate development, civic and benevolent causes, and delivering lectures, both publicly and in educational institutions, on all aspects of glass production. He was a trustee of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1896 until his death; his extensive collection of documents and artifacts related to glass are located in that school’s archives. Throughout his life, Gaffield confronted various men, including Wendell Phillips, over perceived scientific and historical inaccuracies concerning glassmaking in their public writings and statements. Phillips’s refusal to acknowledge Gaffield’s expertise and amend his celebrated “Lost Arts” lecture was evidence to Mayo of Phillips’s unsoundness of mind and penchant for opining on topics about which he was unqualified to speak, especially political economy. Ashtabula (Ohio) Weekly Telegraph, 1 March 1873; Boston Post, 11 January 1875; Port Jervis (N.Y.) Evening Gazette, 15 February 1877; Arthur Wellington Brayley, Schools and Schoolboys of Old Boston (Boston, Mass., 1894), 308–09; Joan E. Kaiser, The Glass Industry in South Boston (Hanover, N.H., 2009), 197–204. is proven
from authority and still Mr Phillips, who classed Mr Gaffield among his
personal friends continues to deliver this lecture without one sign of correction. More than a year ago Mr G. commenced to expostulate with him
on his error of statements in it, and finaly as a indignant at
having his profession so misrepresented by a great teacher he pitches into
him.—and still to no effect. Phillips apparently believes in his own infallibility. If facts don’t agree with him “so much the worse for the facts”.⁸Mayo alludes here to an expression coined by the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814): “If theory conflicts with the facts, so much the worse for the facts.” György Lukàcs, Tactics and Ethics (1929: New York, 1972), 30.

We all hold him high in our estimation for the noble work he did when
he walked and talked with his life in his hand, and this history will always
be a book by itself—His new books I dont like at all.⁹Though a stalwart defender of African American rights until his death, Wendell Phillips increasingly focused his attention on the issues of temperance, equal rights for women and Native Americans, and labor reform during the last fifteen years of his life. Of these causes, activism in support of labor most alienated his old friends in the antislavery movement. Phillips believed that industrial capitalists had gained such an ascendancy over workers and politics that they threatened the life of the American republic every bit as much as slaveholders had before the Civil War. To restore parity between capital and labor, he advocated an eight-hour workday and industrial cooperation, that is, laws requiring cooperative investments by workers in the incorporation of new companies. Phillips endorsed these planks as well as prohibition, woman suffrage, and greenbackism when he ran for governor of Massachusetts on the Labor Reform ticket in 1870. Although Phillips was decisively defeated, his loyal support of organized labor and their political spokesman, the peripatetic Benjamin F. Butler, made him despised and distrusted by businessmen such as James H. Mayo. Stewart, Wendell Phillips, 296–303; Millington W. Bergeson-Lockwood, “The People Coming to Power! Wendell Phillips, Benjamin F. Butler, and the Politics of Labor Reform,” in Wendell Phillips, Social Justice, and the Power of the Past, ed. A.J. Aiséirithe and Donald Yacovone (Baton Rouge, La., 2016), 181–207. A soldier who does
battle with all bravery and saves his cause—& comes home—and from
force of habit keeps up his carving and shooting among his friends, will
soon wear out his welcome. Truth is a great wrestler—and will surely trip
up Bombastic Juniors as well as the preacher of truth as a .

I will again say, I very much want to know what you think of our Wendell Phillips—You know him well, and in our journeying conversation I
was rather dampened in my convictions by your confidence in him—

Yours truly

JAMES H. MAYO

ALS: General Correspondence File, reel 3, frames 94–96L, FD Papers, DLC.