FREDERICK DOUGLASS TO JAMES STANDFIELD

Newcastle-upon-Tyne, [Eng.] 2 August 1846.

James StandfieldStandfield, James

James Standfield (c. 1809–c. 1861), a grocer and secretary of the Belfast Anti-Slavery Society, was one of the city’s most active abolitionists during the 1840s. A member of the Established Church of Ireland, Standfield as early as 1843 urged Irish Presbyterians to exclude proslavery foreign churchmen from their pulpits. Well into 1844 he refrained from attacking the Free Church of Scotland for accepting donations from the U.S. South, but in 1845 he introduced Douglass to the Free Church controversy. Early in 1846 Standfield defended Douglass’s threatened libel suit against visiting American clergyman Thomas Smyth. He also led an antislavery rally with Douglass and the Reverend Isaac Nelson in Belfast, where Standfield presented a petition against the acceptance of slaveholders’ donations to the Free Church. As late as June 1860, Standfield criticized Belfast Presbyterians for receiving money collected in American slave states. Lib., 1 August 1845, 4 September 1846; Merrill and Ruchames, Garrison Letters, 3:423n; J. F. Maclear, “Thomas Smyth, Frederick Douglass, and the Belfast Antislavery Campaign,” South Carolina Historical Magazine, 80:288–89, 294 (October 1979); Riach, “Ireland and the Campaign against American Slavery,” 130–31, 276–78, 297–303, 332–33, 531. Esq

Belfast

DEAR FRIEND—

Yours accompanying the retractation of the Revd. retailer of Slander Dr. SmythSmyth, Thomas

A Presbyterian minister of Scots-Irish descent, Thomas Smyth (1808–73) was born in Belfast, Ireland, and educated at Belfast College and in London at Highbury College. After immigrating to the United States with his parents in 1830, he continued his studies at Princeton Theological Seminary before his ordination the following year. From 1834 until his death, he was the pastor of the Second Presbyterian Church in Charleston, South Carolina. A prolific writer of doctrinal treatises and devotional literature, Smyth also wrote an ethnological justification of African slavery titled The Unity of the Human Races (New York, 1850). In 1843 Princeton University awarded him a doctor of divinity degree. Smyth figured prominently in the early fortunes of the Free Church of Scotland, raising a large share of the approximately $9,000 that the Free Church collected from proslavery churches in the South. When some members of the Free Church began expressing abolitionist sentiments, Smyth threatened to discontinue southern financial support. In July 1846, both Douglass and Smyth were in Belfast to influence the General Assembly of the Irish Presbyterian Church. While Douglass and other abolitionists urged that the Free Church “send back the money,” Smyth wanted the church to take a proslavery position and counterattacked with the slogan “Send Back the Nigger.” After an attempt to discredit Douglass surfaced, Douglass sued Smyth for defamation of character. To avoid further controversy at the assembly, church leaders asked Smyth not to participate. Lib., 26 April 1844; Louisa Cheves [Smythe] Stoney, ed., Autobiographical Notes, Letters, and Reflections by Thomas Smyth, D.D. (Charleston, SC, 1914), 217–19; Thomas Smyth, The Claims of the Free Church of Scotland to the Sympathy and Assistance ofAmerican Christians (Edinburgh, Scot., 1844); idem, The Character of the Late Thomas Chalmers, D.D., LL.D., and the Lessons of His Life, from Personal Recollections (Charleston, S.C., 1848), 13–17; Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall, 83–97; J. F. MacLear, “Thomas Smyth, Frederick Douglass, and the Belfast Antislavery Campaign,” South Carolina Historical Magazine, 80:288–94 (October 1979); George Shepperson, “Notes and Documents: Thomas Chalmers, the Free Church of Scotland, and the South,” Journal of Southern History, 17:520–26 (November 1951); idem, “The Free Church and American Slavery,” 132–33; ACAB, 5:600; DAB, 14:377–78. has reached me. It is not so full as I could have wished—yet as I am advised to accept it by my legal advisers I suppose tis best to do so.—I hope you will take the necessary measures for its publication. Mr. SmealSmeal, William

William Smeal (1793-1877) was a Glasgow Quaker and a successful tea merchant. He was a leading member of the Glasgow Emancipation Society and often served in its powerful position of secretary. He and his brother, Robert, also edited and published the British Friend, a monthly Quaker journal, in 1843. A friend and devoted supporter of William Lloyd Garrison, Smeal believed with Garrison that abolitionism could be achieved only under a program that pursued such related reforms as peace, temperance, and women's rights with equal fervor. A strong Union supporter during the Civil War, Smeal and Andrew Paton prevented some clippers bound for the Confederacy from leaving Glasgow. Garrison and Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 2:398, 402; 4:67, 222-23, 283; C. Duncan Rice, The Scots Abolitionists, 1833-1861 (Baton Rouge, La., 1981), 37, 41-44; Temperley, British Antislavery, 210-13. at Glasgow requested me to let him have it published before it was published in Belfast. But I declined to do so on the ground that as the slander was first uttered there, the retractation should first appear there[.] I shall trust to your fedelity in arrangeing and publishing the whole correspondence. Whatever may be the cost I shall try to pay it.

You have already laid me under deep and lastings obligations to you for your readyness to advise, counsel and direct me when surrounded and beset by difficulties. The only conpensation I can make shall be yours. It is by leading such a life of uprightness—and devotion to the cause of human freedom, justice and humanity as shall prove me worthy of your kind and almost parental attention.

I am to lecture here tomorrow night. The prospect is fair for a good meeting—In North Shields on tuesday night and from thence I shall probably go to London,³Douglass spoke in North Shields on 4 August and then moved on to London, where he delivered “The American Temperance Movement, Slavery and Prejudice” on 7 August 1846. Newcastle Guardian, 8 August 1846; Lib., 27 November 1846; Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 1:316–41. Where I hope to meet 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. , &c. &c. I will write Davidson & Torrance Esq. tomrrow with the pound[.] I will send it to you[.] [P]lease remember me kindly all the members of your family, and especially to my amable little friend Jane⁴Jane Standfield may have been the wife or daughter of James Standfield.

Very sincerely & gratefully Yours

F. DOUGLASS

ALS: General Correspondence File, reel 1, frame 629, FD Papers, DLC.