FREDERICK DOUGLASS TO WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

Lynn, [Mass.] 21 April 1847.

MY DEAR FRIENDGarrison, 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. :

I hasten to inform you of my safe arrival at home. I left Liverpool per steamship Cambria, at 12 o’clock on Sunday, April 4th, and reached Halifax on Sunday evening, the 18th, and here on Tuesday afternoon, about 6,¹Douglass returned to the United States from his European tour on Tuesday, 20 April 1847. Lib., 23 April 1847.—thus performing the voyage in sixteen days and six hours.

My passage was not the most agreeable;²Douglass relayed the events concerning his voyage on the Cambria in a similar letter to John Thadeus Delane, dated 3 April 1847. That letter also appears in this volume. for, aside from the head winds, a rough sea, and the innumerable perils of the deep, I had the cruel, and almost omnipotent and omnipresent spirit of American slavery with which to contend.

After an interesting tour of twenty months through the British isles,—during which, I made use of all the various means of conveyance, by land and sea, from town to town, and city to city, my feelings as a man, and my rights as a passenger, sacredly regarded, and never being able to detect the slightest dislike to me on account of my color,—I bid farewell to monarchical England, and looked toward democratic America; and while yet three thousand miles away from her shores, at the first step, I am smitten with the pestilential breath of her slave system! I came home a proscribed man; and this, solely to propitiate American pro-slavery hate. The American public demanded my exclusion from the saloon of the steamship, and the company owning the steamer had not the virtue to resist the demand. The dominion of slavery is no longer confined under the star-spangled banner, but extends itself, and bears away, even under that of Great Britain. But, without farther preface, I will at once put you in possession of the facts in the case.

On the 4th of last March, in company with my friend Mr. George Moxhay, of the Hall of Commerce, London, I called upon the agent of the Cunard line of steamers, for the purpose of securing a berth in one of the Company’s vessels, to sail for the United States on the 4th of April. I was informed by the agent, that there was but one berth unsold, and that was berth 72, in the Cambria. This berth I took, and paid for—paying first class price. I then asked the agent, whether there would be any difficulty in my enjoying any of the rights and privileges on board the ship, granted to white passengers. ‘Certainly not,’ was the reply. On hearing this, I left the office.

Reposing on the honour and the integrity of the Company, and never dreaming of the possibility of a contingency to deprive me of my berth, I

made myself perfectly easy till the afternoon of the 3d April, the day previous te our contemplated departure from Liverpool to Boston. I then went on board with my baggage; and here, to my surprise, disappointment and mortification, I learned that my berth was given to another—that on account of the color of my skin, it had been decided that I should not have the berth for which I had paid, and to which I was justly entitled! Confused and confounded by this intelligence, I went to the office of the agent in Liverpool, for an explanation of what I had heard on board the steamer, was now lying in the Mersey about two miles frern the shore. The agent, Mr. McIver,³Charles McIver. with the harshness of an American slaveholder, told me that the agent from whom I had purchased my ticket had no right to sell it to me. I replied that I knew nothing more of the authority of the agent to sell tickets, than what I learned from the public press. He was there advertised as the authorised agent of the Company, and persons wishing to secure passage in the Company's ships were requested to call upon him. I had as much right to regard Mr. Foord as the agent in London, as to regard Mr. McIver the agent in Liverpool. They were both the advertised agents of the Company. But here was not the difficulty, as I afterwards compelled him to confess. This was a deceitful stratagem, (I will say nothing of its meanness,) to deprive me of my berth, without openly incurring the responsibility of trampling upon, and robbing a traveller of his rights, on account of the color of his skin.

The ageat said, that great dissatisfaction had been given to the American travelling public, by my having been permitted on the quarter-deck, when crossing the Atlantic in the summer of 1845, and that much ill-feeling had been created against the line in America by what I said against American slavery during the voyage; and that while he would not undertake to defend American prejudice, he must, nevertheless, prevent the recurrence of any such event again; and that, if I went home in the ship, I must go in an apartment wholly separate from the white passengers; but that I should have every accommodation in the way of attention, and apartments enjoyed by other passengers. Subject to this restriction, I must never enter the saloon,—the part of the ship the most commodious, and where other passengers took their meals. I must eat alone—sleep alone—be alone. These were my limits on board the British steamship Cambria. By this regulation, I was not only deprived of the privilege of eating in the saloon, but also shut out from religious worship. We had two Sundays during the voyage, and in conformity to the religious ideas of the Company, as well as of[ ]the British public, had regular religious services performed

on board. They called upon ‘our Father,’⁴The Lord’s Prayer, as contained in Matt. 6:9. the Creator of the heavens and the earth—the God who has made of one blood all nations,⁵Acts 17:26. the black as well as the white—to bless them—while they cursed and excluded me on account of the color of my skin. This, I thought, was Ameriean slaveholding religion, under British colors, and I felt myself no great laser by being excluded from its benefits.

Aside from this proscription, I was as well provided for as any other passenger. Indeed, my apartments were much to be preferred to any which I saw on board. I was treated with the utmost politeness by every officer on board, and received every attention from the servants during the whole voyage. It may be asked, then, why do I yet complain? The answer is, that my position was one of coercion, when it ought to have been that of option. The difference is as wide as that of freedom and slavery; and the man who cannot see the one, cannot see the other.

In haste, yours, sincerely,

FREDERICK DOUGLASS.

PLSr: Lib., 30 April 1847. Reprinted in NASS, 6 May 1847; PaF, 6 May 1847; Newcastle-upon-Tyne Christian, 3:518–21 (1 June 1847); JNH, 10:722–25 (October 1925); Woodson, Mind of the Negro, 458–61.