Glasgow, [Scot.] 22 Sept[ember] 1846.

Isabel Jennings.

Care of Mrs. Boath.

Parkfield.

Berkenhead.¹Birkenhead is a town and port in west central England at the mouth of the Mersey River, adjacent to Liverpool. Cohen, Columbia Gazetteer, 1:358.

MY DEAR FRIEND,

May I hope to be forgiven for this long silence. I know if you were acquainted with my movements for a few weeks past I should readily receive your forgiveness. I have been very closely engaged so much so that I have hardly had time to attend to my buisness corrispondence. I have time now to do little more than to inform you where I am—and where I am likely to be the coming fortnight. I came to this city yesterday expecting to assist Friend 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. in holding a meeting here last night—but owing to the shortness of the notice given to the freinds here of his coming there was no meeting appointed and hence my labour in coming is for the present lost.²Douglass and a rheumatic Garrison arrived in Glasgow during a storm on 19 September only to find the city hall, the location arranged for their lectures, occupied until 30 September. Lib., 30 October 1846; NASS, 1 October 1846; Merrill and Ruchames, Garrison Letters, 3:423–25. We have a meeting in Greenock to night and another in Paisley to morrow night—and thursday night and friday night we hold meetings in Edinburgh—and on tuesday night and wednesday night probably at Dundee.³On 22 September Douglass, Garrison, and John Murray spoke in Paisley. On 23 September they spoke in Greenock, moving on to Edinburgh, where they spoke on 24 and 25 September. By 28 September they arrived for a meeting in Dundee, followed by a meeting in Glasgow on 30 September. On 3 and 6 October, they lectured in Belfast, Ireland. Merrill and Ruchames, Garrison Letters, 3:423–35. Mr. Garrison will then proceed to Belfast⁴Garrison arrived in Belfast on 3 October 1846, lectured there, and departed for Dublin, where he met Henry C. Wright and Richard D. Webb. He reunited with Douglass in Wrexham, Wales, on 9 October 1846. NASS, 29 October 1846; Garrison and Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 2:175–76; Merrill and Ruchames, Garrison Letters, 3:435–37.—stopping however in this city long enough to hold two meetings. I shall not accompany him to Belfast or in any part of Ireland. He will have the field to himself. I could wish to be with him at Cork⁵Garrison hoped to visit Cork, Ireland, but underestimated the distance to the city and could not fit it into his schedule. Lib., 30 October 1846; Garrison and Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 3:155–78; Merrill and Ruchames, Garrison Letters, 3:429–30.—but it will not be in my power[.] I am now about to tell you something which will make you think me the most fickle of men. I have decided to stay in this country six months longer⁶Douglass remained in England until April 1847. Lib., 26 March 1847. and I should not wonder if Mr. Wright⁷Henry C. Wright. should do the same. Though I am sure with far less reason than I have to justify me in staying, I have decided to stay in consequence of the advice both of Mr. Garrison and Mr. Thompson[.]⁸George Thompson. Both think the present a most favorable oppertunity for remodelling the Antislavery feeling of this country and bringing it to the aid of the true antislavery society in America—and each think it would be wrong for me to miss it. I have therefore decided to stay.

You may easily suppose the conclusion come to reluctantly when I tell you I had already written to my Anna⁹Douglass’s letter to his wife promising that he would return to Lynn on 20 November 1846 has not been located. telling her to expect me home on the 20th Nov. It will cost her some pain. Disappointment is the common lot of all¹⁰Possibly a variation on a quotation from a sermon by the Reverend Charles G. Finney, president of Oberlin College: “Great tribulations are the common lot of saints in every age and nation.” Oberlin Evangelist, 4 June 1845.—this may afford slight relief till I come.

In haste Dear Isa—Sincerely Yours

FREDERICK DOUGLASS

ALS: General Correspondence File, reel 1, frames 631–33, FD Papers, DLC. PLSr: Foner, Life and Writings, 5:48–49.