FREDERICK DOUGLASS TO RUTH COX

[Belfast, Ire. 17 July 1846].

MY OWN DEAR SISTER HARRIETCox, Ruth (Harriet Bailey)

Ruth Cox (1818–1900), an escaped slave from Congressman John Leeds Kerr’s home in Easton, Talbot County, Maryland, assumed the name Harriet Bailey as a fugitive. In 1842 Cox escaped to West Chester, Pennsylvania, where the Quaker community protected and employed her. While on a speaking tour of Pennsylvania in 1843, Douglass mistakenly identified Cox as his youngest sister, Harriet, and invited her to live with his family in Lynn, Massachusetts. Cox stayed with the Douglass family, using the name Harriet Bailey as protection from slave catchers, and assisted Anna in running the household and taking in piecework. In 1847 Cox married Perry Frank Adams and moved to Springfield, Massachusetts, where they had three children, Matilda Ann, Ebby, and Perry Frank, Jr., and adopted a fourth, Samuel Hall. The Adamses were involved in the antislavery movement in Springfield, with Perry, Sr., a member of the African American Massachusetts State Council in 1854 and connected to John Brown’s secretive League of Gileadites in 1852. In 1861 the family migrated to Haiti under the sponsorship of the Haitian Emigration Bureau, but returned to Springfield sometime around the mid-1860s, as many other emigrants connected with that organization did. After Perry’s death in 1868, Harriet earned her living as a seamstress in Massachusetts and in Rhode Island until migrating to Nebraska with her daughter and son-in-law, minister William Vanderzee. Aaron Anthony Slave Distribution, 22 October 1827, Talbot County Distributions, V.JP#D, 58–59, MdTCH; Norfolk Weekly News, 7 March 1894; Wyuka Cemetery Burial Permit No. 1785, 23 April 1900, Wyuka Cemetery, Lincoln, Neb.; William H. Vanderzee, “John Brown in Springfield, Massachusetts,” 31 October 1918, KHi; Alice V. Coffee, “Lest We Forget” (n.p., n.d.), Alyce McWilliams Hall Collection, NbHi; Ellen Ginzburg Migliorino and Giorgio G. Campanaro, “Frederick Douglass’s More Intimate Nature as Revealed in Some of His Unpublished Letters,” Southern Studies, 18:480–87 (Winter 1979). ,¹Harriet Bailey, the name of Douglass’s sister, was the alias of Ruth Cox.

I am not unmindful of you although I did not write to you by the last steamer. I always think of you among the beloved one’s of my family. The enclosed letter is to my Dear AnnaDouglass, Anna Murray

Anna Murray Douglass (c. 1813-82), Douglass’s first wife, was born free in Denton, Maryland. She was the eighth child of Bambarra and Mary Murray, slaves who had been manumitted shortly before her birth. At seventeen she moved to Baltimore, where she worked as a domestic and met Douglass at meetings of the East Baltimore Mental Improvement Society. In 1838, Murray helped Douglass finance his escape, and she joined him in New York City, where they were married on 15 September 1838. During Douglass’s first tour of the British Isles (1845-47), she remained in Lynn, Massachusetts, where she supported the family by binding shoes. She gained a reputation for frugality and skillful household management, qualities that would contribute greatly to her family’s financial prosperity over the years. A member of the Lynn Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society and a regular participant in the annual antislavery bazaars in Boston, she continued her antislavery activities after moving to Rochester in 1847. Unlettered, reserved, and, according to her husband, never completely at ease in white company, she seldom appeared at public functions with Douglass. She was nevertheless affectionately remembered by her husband’s associates as a “warm” and “hospitable” hostess at their home. On 9 July 1882, Anna Douglass suffered an attack of paralysis in Washington, D.C., and died there on 4 August. Lib., 18 November, 2 December 1853; Philadelphia Christian Recorder, 20 July 1882; Washington (D.C.) Post, 5 August 1882; Rosetta Douglass Sprague, My Mother as I Recall Her: A Paper Delivered before the Anna Murray Douglass Union, W.C.T.U., May 10, 1900 (1900; Washington, D.C., 1923); Jane Marsh Parker, “Reminiscences of Frederick Douglass,” Outlook, 51:552-53 (6 April 1895); Dorothy Sterling, ed., We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1984), 132-37; Julie R. Nelson, “The Best of Intentions: Anna Murray Douglass, Helen Pitts Douglass, and the Challenge of Social Equality,’ Proteus: A Journal of Ideas, 12:39-42 (Spring 1995); Sylvia Lyons Render, “Afro-American Women: The Outstanding and the Obscure,” Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress, 32:306-10 (October 1975). .²The enclosed letter from Douglass to his wife Anna has not been located. I have written one which will be read by JerrimiahSanderson, Jeremiah Burke

Born into the free black community in New Bedford, Massachusetts, Jeremiah Burke Sanderson (1821–75) became a leader in the antislavery movement during the 1840s. From his barbershop, a popular meeting place for African American men, he sold issues of the Liberator. He also joined the New Bedford Anti-Slavery Society, later becoming its secretary. After a successful lecture tour of the Northeast, he addressed the 1845 meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society. In 1853 he was appointed to the National Council of the Colored People and attended several black state conventions after moving to California in 1854. He remained active in politics, promoting the causes of black people against Jim Crow laws and of black education in California for the rest of his life. Kathryn Grover, The Fugitive’s Gibraltar: Escaping Slaves and Abolitionism in New Bedford, Massachusetts (Amherst, Mass., 2001), 170, 172–75, 180, 231, 276, 314; Jack Salzman, ed., Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History, 5 vols. (New York, 1996), 5:2385; Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, 3:387–88n. .³The enclosed letter to be read by Jeremiah Burke Sanderson of New Bedford, Massachusetts, has not been located. You will see both—and both of them I want you to read over and over again until Dear Anna shall fully understand their contents. I shall not send any caps for our Boys⁴Douglass’s sons, Lewis, Frederick, Jr., and Charles. or a shawl for Dear Anna—as JamesBuffum, 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. ⁵James N. Buffum. has too many things to bring home for himself to be troubled with mine. I shall send a beautiful work box⁶The sewing box given to Cox by Douglass is part of the Alyce McWilliams Hall Collection in the Nebraska State Historical Society. to you which I bought in London and gave sis dollars for it. You will be pleased with it I know. The Boys must wait for presents till I come home, or until they come to this country. You will get this letter about two weeks before you see friend Buffum. Write me by the next steamer. What you think of coming to this country and [illegible][.] Speak Dear Harriet just what you think—even though differ from me. I will love you all the more for speaking out.

Your Brother

F. DOUGLASS

ALS: Correspondence File, Additions II, FD Papers, DLC.