Private

Wincobank Hall

Rotherham

Feb. 2. 1863.

Dear Mr. Douglass,

I have received through my dear friend, Miss Amé-Draz,Amé-Draz, Rosine

A Swiss national, Rosine Amé-Draz (c. 1816–?) first arrived in England on 11 July 1838, listing her profession as teacher. In 1841 she was teaching and living in the parish of Egg Buckland, Devonshire. After spending an undetermined length of time back in Switzerland, she returned to England in July 1848, this time listing her profession as governess. According to the 1861 English Census (where she was recorded as “Rosine Ann Davy,” a native of Neufchatel, Switzerland), she was staying in the home of Mrs. Elizabeth Read of Ecclesfield, Yorkshire. By 1871 she was serving as governess to the children of George S. Kemp, a wealthy Lancashire manufacturer. 1841 England Census, Devonshire, Egg Buckland, 11; 1861 England Census, Yorkshire, Ecclesfield, 56; 1871 England Census, Lancashire, Castleton, 1; “England, Alien Arrivals, 1810–1811, 1826–1869,” Ancestry.com. your kind messages of christian sympathy, and I must write a line of grateful acknowledgement. But I have written very few letters and I find the employment very burdensome. I cannot say what I wish. My head & hand are weak and my heart is very

heavy, as if a great cold stone were pressing on it. You know what sorrow and bereavement are. I remember how much you suffered when you lost your dear little girl—but you had other children to turn to, to love and care for. You do not know what it is to have lost your all. But it is the Lord. I must be dumb and open not my mouth, because He has done it. I have the sweetest recollections of my beloved daughter'sRawson, Elizabeth "Lizzie"

Elizabeth (Lizzie) Rawson (ca. 1829-1862) was the only child and daughter of Mary Anne Rawson and her husband William Bacon Rawson. holy, useful life, and I have the strongest assurance that, through

infinite grace, her ransomed spirit is at rest in the Saviour's presence where there is fullness of joy. But this does not prevent the present from being most dreary & desolate. I long so intensely to see that dear face, to hear that sweet face, to touch that vanished hand.

I am thankful that my deep sorrows do not so far absorb me, as to prevent my feeling for and with my friends, and from what Miss A.D. hints, I fear you are feeling anxiety and care. But I cannot

help hoping & believing that there is a good time coming for you and your dear people. A time of transition, a time of revolution and war, must always be attended with trials but there is a bright future before you, even on earth. And how delightful it is for us both, under our different burdens of sorrow, to be permitted to look forward to that time which cannot be far distant when we shall join the redeemed multitude before the throne, and God himself shall wipe away all our tears—

I have been so much interested in all that Miss A.D. has told me of your noble-minded DaughterSprague, Rosetta Douglass

Rosetta Douglass Sprague (1839–1906), the first child of Anna and Frederick Douglass, was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, on 24 June 1839. In her childhood, Rosetta wrote and read letters for her mother, whom she assisted with housework and with piecework for the shoe factories in Lynn, Massachusetts. Her father sent Rosetta to school at age seven in Albany, New York, where she lived with Abigail and Lydia Mott. When the Douglass family moved to Rochester, Rosetta began attending the Seward Seminary, where her presence offended the parents of one of the white students and led to her segregation from the other pupils. Her father, in a fury, removed Rosetta from the school and hired a private tutor for his daughter. Rosetta, along with her three brothers, then led other students in the efforts to desegregate Rochester’s public school system. From 1854 to 1855, Rosetta attended Oberlin College preparatory school, one of the first institutions of higher education to accept African Americans and women. She became a teacher in Philadelphia and Salem, Massachusetts, until her marriage in 1863 to Nathan Sprague, with whom she had seven children. Before her death in 1906, she wrote a memoir of her mother that remains one of the most complete documents of Anna Murray Douglass’s life. Rosetta Douglass Sprague, My Mother as I Recall Her: A Paper Read before the Anna Murray Douglass Union, W.C.T.U., May 10, 1900 (1900; Washington, D.C., 1923); Dorothy Sterling, ed., We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1984), 132–45; Ellen N. Lawson and Marlene Merrill, “The Antebellum ‘Talented Thousandth’: Black College Students at Oberlin before the Civil War,” Journal of Negro Education, 52: 145 (Spring 1983); Miriam DeCosta-Willis, “Smoothing the Tucks in Father’s Linen: The Women of Cedar Hill,” Sage, 4: 30–33 (Fall 1987); Sylvia Lyons Render, “Afro-American Women: The Outstanding and the Obscure,” Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress, 32: 306–10 (October 1975), 307–10. . May her efforts to elevate her race and to support herself be as successful as she can desire.

I can never understand why you and other Anti-slavery friends object to colonisation. It is a plan which commends itself to me. I wish you would write something about it in your "Monthly." I should like to see you editing a paper in Liberia. I think you would be happier and

feel more in your place than in America. I should like to see you Governor of Liberia

We look with great anxiety for news from America. M^r. G. ThompsonThompson, George

George Thompson (1804-78), originally from Liverpool, was an early advocate of slave emancipation in the British colonies and was an influential British ally of William Lloyd Garrison. Thompson lectured for the Agency Committee, a group that helped force passage of the West Indian Emancipation Act of 1833. That same year, he was among the founders of the Edinburgh Society for the Abolition of Slavery throughout the World. As a member of Parliament from 1847 to 1852, Thompson was a member of the Parliamentary Reform Association and the Anti-Corn Law League, and promoted the production of East Indian cotton in order to undermine American slavery. Thompson also promoted the antislavery cause during trips to the United States during the 1830s, 1850s, and 1860s. Lib., 29 May 1846; Garrison and Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1:434-522, 2:1-72; Howard Temperley, British Antislavery, 1833-1870 (Columbia, S.C., 1972), 23-29; C. Duncan Rice, "The Anti-Slavery Mission of George Thompson to the United States, 1834-1835," Journal of American Studies, 2:13-41 (April 1968); DNB, 19:691. has been lecturing in Sheffield on this most dreadful war. I think he has done good. The people were, before his lecture, too much inclined to sympathise with the South. We have, also had W. Jackson, Jefferson Davis’s coachman. He spoke in the schoolroom here and excited much interest amongst our villagers. I was not able to hear either lecturer.

My dearest MotherRead, Elizabeth

Elizabeth Read and her husband Joseph Read (1774-1837) of Wincobank Hall were parents to Mary Anne Rawson. desires to be kindly remembered. She is as well as we can expect her to be in her 85^th year.

Yours with much affection,

M. A. RawsonRawson, Mary Anne