FREDERICK DOUGLASS TO MARIA WESTON CHAPMAN

Kilmarnock, Scot. 29 March 1846.

Mrs M W ChapmanChapman, Maria Weston

Maria Weston Chapman (1806-85), known as "Garrison's Lieutenant," was a forceful writer and editor of several antistavery periodicals. From a family of wealthy Bostonians who educated their daughters in Europe, she briefly supervised one of the nation's first female high schools. After marrying merchant [Henry Grafton Chapman]] in 1830, she became active in the abolitionist movement. When her husband died in 1842, abolition became the consuming work of her life. Chapman was a driving force in both the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society and the American Anti-Slavery Society. Although she shunned public speaking, she served on committees and organized bazaars and other fundraising events for the Garrisonians. She also edited the annual report of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, and she assisted in editing both the Liberator and the National Anti-Slavery Standard. Clare Taylor, Women of the Anti-Slavery Movement: The Weston Sisters (New York, 1995); Catherine Clinton, "Maria Weston Chapman," in Portraits of American Women, comp. G. J. Barker-Benfield and Catherine Clinton, 2, vols. (New York, 1991), 1:147-67; Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease, Bound with Them in Chains: A Biographical History of the Antislavery Movement (Westport, Conn., 1972), 28–59; Edward T. James et al., eds., Notable American Women, 1607-1950: A Biographical Dictionary, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), 1:324-25; DAB, 4:19.

MY DEAR MADAM,

(PRIVATE)¹Maria Weston Chapman received many letters written to her as an officer in the American Anti-Slavery Society. Douglass wrote “Private” at the top of this letter to indicate that the information was confidential, and the matter between Chapman and himself only.

I take up my pen to thank you for the ‘liberty bell’²The Liberty Bell, a gift book sold annually by the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society to raise funds. and the kind note which you were pleased to send me by the Cambria[.] I have not yet found time to read the ‘Liberty bell’ but hope to do so soon. My time is greatly taken up with immediate engagements—growing necessarily out of my present contact with friends here. I find that in order to make my visit of service to our sacred cause at home, I must as far as possible concentrate my strength up on those circles in whose midst I find my self placed. I am trying to preach and practice a genuine antislavery life—turning nither to the right—or left, and I think not without success. I think you may safely calculate on seeing some proof of this at your next Bazaar.³Each December from 1834 to 1858, the members of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society held a fundraising fair at which they sold goods donated by various sewing circles throughout Massachusetts and Britain. Chapman was the main organizing force behind this fair. Chambers-Schiller, “Boston Antislavery Fair,” 252–53. At the suggestion of Mr. R. D. WebbWebb, Richard Davis

Richard D. Webb was a Garrisonian abolitionist from Dublin, Ireland, whom Douglass met on his first trip to the British Isles in 1845. Originally a Quaker, he turned toward Unitarianism as his antislavery passions became more radical. A successful printer, Webb guided the small, but intensely active, Hibernian Anti-Slavery Society in Dublin, of which James Haughton and his family were also members. Webb printed the organ of the British Garrisonian abolitionist movement, the Anti-Slavery Advocate, out of his Dublin-based office. The British Garrisonians were active pamphleteers, and Webb's own The National AntiSlavery Societies of England and the United States (1852) was one of the most confident and able statements of the Garrisonian cause to appear on either side of the Atlantic. Temperley, British Antislavery, 210, 212-13, 227, 237, 239, 244, 252-54, 256, 259; Taylor, British and American Abolitionists, 241-44, 248, 258-59, 293-94. ⁴Richard D. Webb. I have inserted an appeal in behalf of the Bazaar in my narrative, so that wherever the narrative goes, there also goes an appeal in behalf of the Old organized Anti Slavery Bazaar.⁵In the Irish edition of his Narrative, Douglass added a notice, “To the Friends of the Slave,” in which he requested donations from British and Irish readers for the Boston Anti-Slavery Fair. Douglass Papers, ser. 2, 1:166–68. One of the first objects in my lectures—has been to make that Bazaar prominent—and increase its by encreasing its means. I have done so from no sordid motive, but because I

believe it to be a powerful instrument in affording means to carry on our important antislavery Machinery[.] I say this the more freely—because, though I consider my self as forming a humble part of that machinery I have never received any pecuniary aid directly from it. I have never absolutely needed any such aid from it. I have even mannaged to get on—and keep in the field with very little means—Lived in a small house paid a small rent, in-dulged in no luxuries—glad to get the common necessearies of life—and have followed on with a glad heart and willing mind—in the thin but brave ranks of our noble pioneer William Lloyd 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. . Just before leaving the United States for this country—my warm and excellent friend N. BuffumBuffum, James Needham

James Needham Buffum (1802—82), born of Quaker parents in North Berwick, Maine, spent most of his life in Lynn, Massachusetts, where he amassed considerable wealth as a carpenter, house contractor, real estate speculator, and financier. Dissatisfied with Quaker passivity on reform issues, Buffum was an early convert to Garrisonianism and participated in the campaign to desegregate New England’s public transportation during the early 1840s. From 1845 through 1847 Buffum accompanied Douglass on a lecture tour of Great Britain. He served as treasurer of the Essex County Anti-Slavery Society and vice-president of a Fourierist organization called the Friends of Social Reform. During Reconstruction he was director of Charles Steams’s Laborers’ Homestead and Southern Emigration Society, which bought land in Virginia for resale to freedmen. Chosen a presidential elector in 1868, Buffum served as mayor of Lynn from 1869 to 1825 and was elected to the Massachusetts legislature in 1.873. Garrison and Garrison, Garrison Life, 3 : 324 45. 4: 358; Mabee, Black Freedom, 114, 119—21, 125, 210—11, 221, 225, 250, 342; Merrill and Ruchames, Garrison Letters, 3 : 138n.; Douglass, Life and Times, 251, 259; James M. McPherson, The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction Princeton, N.J., 1964), 415; Clarence W. Hobbs, Lynn and Surroundings (Lynn, 1886), 141—42; James R. Newhall, Lynn: Her First 250 Years (Lynn, 1880), 133—34; James R. Newhall, History of Lynn, 1864-1893 (Lynn, 1897), 337; Renfrewshire (Scot.) Advertiser, 11 April 1846; Concord (N.H.) Herald of Freedom, 28 November 1845.James Needham Buffum (1807- 87), born of Quaker parents in North Berwick, Maine, spent most of his life in Lynn, Massachusetts, where he amassed considerable wealth as a carpenter, house contractor, real estate speculator, and financier. Dissatisfied with Quaker passivity on reform issues, Buffum was an early convert to Garrisonianism and participated in the campaign to desegregate New England's public transportation during the early 1840s. From 1845 through 1847 Buffum accompanied Douglass on a lecture tour of Great Britain. He served as treasurer of the Essex County Anti-Slavery Society and vice president of a Fourierist organization called Friends of Social Reform. During Reconstruction he was director of Charles Stearns's Laborers' Homestead and Southern Emigration Society, which bought land in Virginia for resale to freedmen. Chosen a presidential elector in 1868, Buffum served as mayor of Lynn from 1869 to 1875 and was elected to the Massachusetts legislature in 1873. Clarence W. Hobbs, Lynn and Surroundings (Lynn, Mass., 1886), 141-42; Garrison and Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 3:324- 25, 4:358; Merrill and Ruchames, Garrison Letters, 3:138n; Mabee, Black Freedom, 114, 119- 21, 125, 210-11, 221, 225, 250, 342. ⁶James N. Buffum.—aware of my poverty, stepped forward with his characteristic liberality and kindly offered to collect a sufficient sum to pay my passage to this land. He tried and succeeded in getting 68 Dollars, just 2 Dollars short of my expences in the steerage.⁷Buffum had solicited funds for Douglass’s passage to Great Britain from wealthy New York abolitionist Gerrit Smith among others. James N. Buffum to Gerrit Smith, 21 June 1845, Gerrit Smith Papers, NSyU. I brought with me three hundred, and fifty dollars, money which I had saved from the sale of my narrative. For means to sustain me while here I have relied—and still rely mainly upon the sale of my narrative. And thus far I have had reason to complain, having already disposed of 2,000 copies. I have mentioned these facts and made these remarks—because I have felt somwhat greaved to see by a letter from you to Mr. R. D. Webb of Dublin that you betray a want of confidence in me as a man, and an abolitionist, utterly inconsistent with all the facts in the history of my connection with the Antislavery enterprise.⁸Maria Weston Chapman wrote a letter to Richard D. Webb in which she voiced suspicions that Douglass was using the British tour and the sales of his book for personal gain rather than for the support of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Webb read that portion of the letter to Douglass. Taylor, British and American Abolitionists, 259–60. In that letter you were pointing out to Mr. Webb the necessity of his keeping a watch over myself and freind Mr. Buffum—but as Mr. Buffum was rich—and I poor while there was little danger but what Mr Buffum would stand firm, I might be bought up by the London Committee.⁹The “London Committee” refers to the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, which was founded by Joseph Sturge in 1839. The organisation sympathised with the anti-Garrisonians after the schism in the American antislavery movement in 1840, a sympathy that grew deeper under the leadership of John Scoble throughout the 1840s. Throughout his stay in Great Britain Douglass battled rumors that he would defect to the opposition abolitionist faction. Merrill and Ruchames, Garrison Letters, 1:343–44n, 2:588–92; Taylor, British and American Abolitionists, 290–92, 296, 300–305; Temperley, British Antislavery, 215–20. Now Dear Madam, you do me great in justice by such comparisons[.] They are direct insinuations and when whispered in the ear of a stranger to whom I look up as a friend they are very embarrassing. Up to the time of hearing Mr. Webb read that letter I supposed I shared your confidence in common with that of the other members of the committe at Boston; I am disappointed. I can assure you Dear Madam that you have mistaken me altogether if you suppose that ether the love of money—or the hate of poverty will drive me from the ranks of the old organized antislavery society[.] But had I no more confidence in them, than you seem to have in me, I would not take a second breath before leaving them. I have withstood the allurements of New organization liberty party—and no organization at home¹⁰Douglass probably refers to the 1844 controversy among Garrisonians over the extreme anarchist positions adopted by New Hampshire abolitionist editor Nathaniel P. Rogers. While most of the Garrisonian inner circle held some form of nonresistant principles by the early 1840s, Rogers editorialized for a “no-organization” ideology that condemned all forms of restrictions on free speech and action within the antislavery movement. When the New Hampshire Anti-Slavery Society took away Rogers’s editorship of its official newspaper, Herald of Freedom, he quit the seciety. This purge of Rogers left significant suspicions and hard feelings among Garrisonians for many years. Lawrence J. Friedman, Gregarious Saints: Self and Community in American Abolitionism, 1830–1870 (Cambridge, Eng., 1982), 59–61; Perry, Radical Abolitionism, 117–28.—why should I not withstand the London Committee. You have trusted me or seemed to do so, at home, why distruste me or seem to do so abroad.

Of One thing I am cirtain, and that is I never gave you any just cause to distrust me, and if I am to be watched over for evel rather than for good, by my professed freinds I can say with propriety save me from my friends, and I will take care of my enemies! Had you kind friend privious to my leaving America given me face to face that advice and freindly counsel which your long experience, and superior wisdom has richly enabled you to do, or written to me a kind letter as did my freind Mr. Phillips¹¹Wendell Phillips. warning me against the London Committee, my feelings toward you, as to him would be those of ardent gratitude. If you wish to drive me from the Anti-slavery society, put me under overseer ship and the work is done. Set some one to watch over me—for evil and let them be so simple minded as to inform me of their office, and the last blow is struck. I have said what I now have, because I wish you to know just how I feel toward you. I wish to be candid with my freind. It would have been quite easy to have passed the matter over had you not sent me the ‘liberty bell,’ and made it my duty to write to you. When I parted from you at the Antislavery office on the morning of the 16 August 1845, I felt on leaving that you expected a faithful discharge of my duties a broad. I went forth feeling my self armed with the confidence reposed in me by yourself and the Board generally—resolved to do my duty. And although not sustained as I supposed myself to be, I can thus far challenge the strictest scrutiny into all my movements[.] I have neither compromised my self nor the character of my friends. But enough.

The cause goes nobly on. Our efforts—that is the effort of friends Wright¹²Henry C. Wright. and Buffum—and my own have been mainly directed toward exposing the conduct of the free church of Scotland—in holding fellowship with slave holders—and taking slave money to build free churches. The Antislavery Committee at Glasgow¹³The Glasgow Emancipation Society, founded by John Murray and William Smeal in 1833, was the most popular Garrisonian organization in Scotland until the 1840s, when two divisions led to its decline. The first division, occurred at the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention, when the female members bolted from the organization to form the Glasgow Female Anti-Slavery Society. The second division took place in. 1846, when conservatives formed the Glasgow New Association for the Abolition of Slavery. During its existence, the Glasgow Emancipation Society welcomed such speakers as George Thompson and supported a variety of antipoverty laws in addition to abolitionism. Rice, Scots Abolitionists, 22–23, 35–42, 80, 91–95, 112; Merrill and Ruchames, Garrison Letters, 3:31n. have succeeded in getting George Thompson¹⁴George Thompson (1804–78), a leading Garrisonian abolitionist in Britain, was born in Liverpool, England. In 1833 he formed emancipation societies in Edinburgh and Glasgow. The following year, he began a fifteen-month speaking tour in the United States that was marked by mob violence from supporters of slavery, and he was forced to leave Boston secretly in 1835. He returned to England, where he worked with British abolitionists. Thompson joined Douglass at a public meeting in Glasgow on 21 April 1846 to condemn the Free Church of Scotland's fellowship with slaveholders. He made two more visits to the United States on behalf of abolitionism. Lib., 29 May 1846; C. Duncan Rice, "The Anti-Slavery Mission of George Thompson to the United States, 1834–1835,” Journal of American Studies, 2:13–31 (April 1968); Garrison and Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1:434–522, 221–72; Temperley, British Antislavery, 237–38; DNB, 10:691. to join us—in an effort to get the free church to send back the money!

Very respectfully Yours

FREDERICK DOUGLASS

P.S. Will you Do me the kindness to send the enclosed note to H. W. Williams,¹⁵Boston-born Henry Willard Williams (1821–95) served as general agent for the Liberator in the early 1840s and occasionally operated the journal during Garrison’s absence. From 1846 to 1849, Williams attended medical school at Harvard and Le Havre, later gaining fame as a pioneer ophthalmic surgeon. Lib., 30 April 1841; Garrison and Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 3:209; Merrill and Ruchames, Garrison Letters, 3:87n, 206n, 335; DAB, 20:265–66. the former agent of the Antislavery office.

Yours &c. &c.

ALS: Anti-Slavery Collection, MB. PLSr: Foner, Life and Writings, 1:142–45. PLeSr: Taylor, British and American Abolitionists, 258–59.