Boston.

Dear Douglass:—Here we are in Boston, the Athens of America. The person who surveyed and laid out this city ought to have a tall monument in Mount Auburn. There are many superb private and public buildings. Their style indicates a refined taste, and great wealth. The people have a sober, intelligent, and busy appearances; and present quite a contrast to the New Yorkers, not having any of their care-worn, devil me-care appearance. I had letters to several gentlemen on Milk street, and found them very polite, and agreeable. If any of your Western readers to East to replenish their stocks of Dry Goods, Boston is an excellent market, and I recommend them to call upon Messrs, Dorrance, Newton & Co.; Sumner, Brewer & Co.; Blanchard, Converse & Co., on Milk street, and the hosts of heavy dealers in their immediate vicinity.

I was much disappointed in not seeing or hearing Rev. Theodore Parker; it would have been a great treat to me. I have read some of Mr. Parker's religious and political works, and admire them for their vigorous style, and the ability with which he handles his subjects.

I was greatly surprised and pleased to find my old friend Louis Hayden, on Cambridge street, in a good store, well filled with goods, and doing a good business. Hayden's life has been somewhat singular. Five years ago he was a slave in Kentucky. Two years ago he left Michigan, depressed in mind, and poverty knawing at his pockets. Now I find him in Boston pushing up into the ranks of her Merchants Princes. Verily, this looks like taking care of himself. And I presume he would not return south for the best situation the slaveholders could give him. I had the pleasure of seeing the Hon. Robert Morris.—I found him in his office surrounded with business. He is a very intelligent and gentlemanly young man, and it was gratifying to find one of the proscribed class occupying so exalted a station in one of the learned Professions. For the first time, I had the pleasure of seeing and taking by the hand, that old veteran Philanthropist, William L. GarrisonGarrison, William Lloyd

William Lloyd Garrison (1805-79) was the foremost white abolitionist of the nineteenth century and was credited with the discovery of Douglass as a speaker at an antislavery meeting in Nantucket in 1841. He began his career as an apprentice printer on the Newburyport (Mass.) Herald at the age of thirteen. Garrison became editor of the Newburyport Free Press in 1826, but the paper closed within a year. He was then associated with a series of periodicals in Boston that advocated reform before Benjamin Lundy offered the young journalist the opportunity to write for his antislavery newspaper. Garrison joined Lundy in editing the Genius of Universal Emancipation in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1829, during the last year of the paper's 1821-1830 run. In 1830 a libel suit against the editors forced the paper to close and landed Garrison in jail. After his release, he courted the wealthy merchants of New York and Boston in order to start the Liberator (1831-65), a weekly journal based in Boston in which he advocated an immediate end to slavery. Garrison's brand of abolition condemned any institution that would tolerate the existence of slavery, including churches, political parties. and even the United States itself and any scheme aimed at removing black people from the country. Instead, Garrison hoped to raise the public's awareness that slavery was morally wrong and thereby force its end in an almost millennial moment of emancipation. His approach appealed to both white and black antislavery advocates but earned him many enemies among those only moderately opposed to slavery and slaveholders alike. Seeing the need for greater action and organization beyond the pages of the Liberator; Garrison joined with other abolitionists to form the New England Anti-Slavery Society in 1831. Two years later he helped found the larger American Anti-Slavery Society. In 1833 he established ties with English abolitionists after a trip to Great Britain, and he later brought the noted and notorious speaker George Thompson to the United States for a tour. Garrison also dedicated himself to women's rights, encouraging women to enter the public sphere by inviting them, via the Liberator, to form female antislavery societies. In addition to the thirty-three women's antislavery societies that flourished by 1838, Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society welcomed women as well as blacks into its ranks. However, female delegates were excluded from the World's Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840 in London. The issue of women's participation in the antislavery movement and Garrison's absolute refusal to turn to politics to end slavery caused a division in the American Anti-Slavery Society. Brothers Lewis and Arthur Tappan, who opposed women's acting as speakers and who hoped to use politics toward abolition, broke with Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society, forming the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, or the "New Organization" in 1841. Garrison's ideas were so closely associated with the "Old Organization" that the American Anti-Slavery Society became known simply as the "Garrisonians." With the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, Garrison believed that he had accomplished his life's work and that of the antislavery movement. He then resigned from the presidency of the American Anti-Slavery Society and closed the Liberator. Wendell Phillips Garrison and Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879: The Story of His Life Told by His Children, 4 vols. (New York, 188589); Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York, 1998); James Brewer Stewart, William Lloyd Garrison and the Challenge of Emancipation (Arlington Heights, Ill., 1992); John L. Thomas, The Liberator: William Lloyd Garrison (Boston, 1963); Dictionary of American Biography, 20 vols. (New York, 1928-36), 7:168-72. .—It really does one good to look upon his bald head and benevolent face. If there is an individual in this world to whom we owe a debt of gratitude, that individual is W. L. Garrison. I found Mr. Nell in the Liberator office, and was happy to make his acquaintance.

Yours, &c.,

R. B.Bacon, Reuben

Boston, Oct. 10th, 1849.