FREDERICK DOUGLASS TO EDMUND QUINCY¹In 1844 Edmund Quincy became corresponding secretary of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, taking over the responsibility of preparing the organization’s annual report. A work of meticulous and extensive research, the report included not only the minutes of the annual meeting, but also summaries of antislavery activity in each state and in other nations, as well as an articulation of the society’s positions on such issues as the US. Constitution and political action. Each report was book length, and collectively, they amount to a detailed history of a large portion of the antislavery movement. Quincy worked on the annual reports until his retirement from antislavery activities in 1865. Robert Vincent Sparks, “Abolition in Silver Slippers: A Biography of Edmund Quincy” (Ph.D. diss., Boston College, 1978), 180; Robert W. Tolf, “Edmund Quincy: Aristocrat Abolitionist” (Ph.D. diss., University of Rochester, 1957), 110–12.

Glasgow, [Scot.] 28 April 1846.

Edmond Quincy.

DEAR FRIEND —

Allow me to thank you for a copy of the last annual report which you kindly sent me. I have read it with much deeper interest than I could have done had I been present at the last annual meeting where it was read and its contents discoursed upon. Let me thank you too for the faithfulness with which you have sketched the history of a nother years progress in our noble cause. I never saw the utter folly and distructive enfluence of no organizeation, more plainly than when I contrasted it with the labor—of the Mass. Board, and the vigelence of you its historian. Nothing seems to have escaped you. I shall feel myself quite ev[e]n with the times w[he]n I get it full well established in my mind.

I think next year—you will have to devote a larger space in your report to Scotland. It has been & is to be the battle field of old orgenised Anti slavery action. It is now all in a blaze of antislavery excitement. You are al-

ready aware that Mr. 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. ²George Thompson. of London has joined us—and attuned his voice to the startling note “send back the money[”]. I heard him last night in Paisley.³Douglass may be confusing the meeting in Paisley with one held the same week in Glasgow. Both James 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. and Henry C. WrightWright, Henry Clarke

Abolitionist and pacifist Henry Clarke Wright (1797-1870) was one of Garrison's close associates. Reared in central New York, Wright served an apprenticeship as a hatmaker before studying at Andover Theological Seminary. In 1835 he joined the American Anti-Slavery Society and served as one of Theodore Dwight Weld's "seventy agents" until the executive board of the American Anti-Slavery Society removed him in 1837 because of his ultraist opinions. At about the same time he gave up his lecturing agency in the American Peace Society, which was also discomfited by his radicalism, and in 1838 helped found the New England Non-Resistance Society. Nonresistance, the foundation of Wright's reform philosophy, proclaimed the sovereignty of individual conscience and opposed all forms of coercion, violence, and the dominion of man over man. In theory Wright condoned violent resistance to slavery, though he personally eschewed violence. From 1842 to 1847 he traveled in Europe, lecturing on nonresistance and abolitionism. His avowal of antisabbatarian views in Scotland and his accusations (later retracted) that Free Churchmen were "drunkards" made Douglass chary of him. "Friend Wright has created against himself prejudices which I as an abolitionist do not feel myself called upon to withstand," Douglass wrote. Wright later turned to spiritualism and helped organize the Universal Peace Union in 1867. He died in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Douglass to Richard D. Webb, 10 November 1845, Anti-Slavery Collection, MB; Henry C. Wright to Douglass, 12 December 1846, in Lib., 29 January 1847; Henry C. Wright, Human Life: Illustrated in My Individual Experience as a Child, a Youth, and a Man (Boston, 1849); Peter Brock, Pacifism in the United Stales: From the Colonial Era to the First World War (Princeton, N.J., 1968), 516-18, 532-600, 926-27; Perry, Radical Abolitionism, 18-22, 60-61, 89-90, 159, 222-29, 234-38, 262, 278-82; ACAB, 6:623; NCAB, 2:232. reported that George Thompson delivered a rousing speech in Glasgow, but Buffum wrote that Thompson joined the party after they had lectured in Paisley. Lib., 1, 29 May 1846. Those who have heard him in his palmist days—say he was never more powerful than now. I think he is the only speaker of whom I had formed a very high opinion—that on first hearing I did not feel a degree of disappointment. His heart is in the work.

He seems as free from the miserable dish water expediencey of new organiseation as if he had been in the heat of the battle in Massachusetts the last five years. We leave here tomorrow for Edinburgh⁴Douglass next spoke in Edinburgh. Lib., 1 May 1846. the very headquarters of the free church. We—that is Friend Wright, Thompson & Buffum⁵Henry C. Wright, George Thompson, and James N. Buffum. shall hold several meetings with sole reference to sending back the money[.] We have some hopes of provoking a discussion between some of the prominent leaders of the free church and Mr. Thompson on the question of holding fellowship with Slaveholders. It would be a grand achievement—since it would bring the matter fairly before the whole people of Scotland. And they only want to have it brought before them in order to a right decesion.

Our friends here are already cherishing the hope that Mr. 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. will visited this country in July next. I can say so far as my observation goes, the field is ripe and ready for the Harvest.⁶In John 4:35 Jesus tells his disciples that the fields are white, or ripe, for the harvest. He owes it to the cause to come—and brush a way the missaprehensions that prevail with regard to him—and the cause of which he is the distinguished leader. He would have a hearing before the british public such as he could not have when here six years a go.⁷In June 1840, William Lloyd Garrison traveled to Britain for the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention, called by the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. When the women attending the convention were barred from speaking and were sent to a separate seating area, Garrison joined them in sympathy. This show of support for gender equality added to the ideological controversy dividing the abolitionist movement. Following the convention, Garrison toured England, Scotland, and Ireland to acclaim and returned to Boston on 17 August 1840. Merrill and Ruchames, Garrison Letters, 2:553—54.

I am very Dear Friend Ever truly yours

F. DOUGLASS

ALS: American Historical Manuscripts, CSmH.