FREDERICK DOUGLASS TO WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

Lynn, [Mass.] 18 July 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 have observed in the Liberator, of the two past weeks, with considerable surprise and much regret, that the conclusion to which I have come, with respect to publishing, at present, an anti-slavery newspaper, has very unwisely and unnecessarily been made the occasion of attack upon yourself, and of most unkind, uncharitable and unjust imputations on the motives of

leading friends of the cause in Boston.¹In June and July 1847, several readers of the Liberator wrote letters expressing disappointment that Douglass had abandoned the idea of starting his own antislavery newspaper. “Libertas” addressed Garrison’s concern that editing a newspaper would limit Douglass’s ability to lecture against slavery by reminding him that Garrison himself devoted much time to lecturing without a harmful effect on his functioning as an editor. An article reprinted from the Boston Chronotype lauded Douglass’s potential as a black editor and noted, “We are surprised at the narrowness of mind that counseled him otherwise.” Isaac Stearns speculated that “selfish considerations are at the bottom of this opposition to his establishing a paper.” He suggested that Garrison feared direct competition from a newspaper venture edited by Douglass. Lib., 9, 16 July 1847. The parties engaged in this work of mischief imagine me hemmed in on every side—overpowered—and my will completely subjected to the Boston Board²A group of Boston-area reformers nicknamed the Boston Board or the Boston “clique” included a number of powerful individuals who dominated the executive board of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. After 1843 they controlled the American Anti-Slavery Society, whose executive board relocated to Massachusetts from New York City. The Boston Board directed the pace and path of Garrisonian abolitionism throughout the North by dominating the national society and by influencing regional organizations and organs such as the Pennsylvania Freeman and the Ohio-based Anti-Slavery Bugle. Members included Garrison; Ellis Gray Loring, an attorney; Francis Jackson, a merchant; Samuel May, Jr., a minister; Wendell Phillips and Edmund Quincy, both full-time reformers; James Russell Lowell, a poet; and many members of the prominent Weston family, including Maria Weston Chapman. Friedman, Gregarious Saints, 43–62; Pease and Pease, Bound with Them in Chains, 39–40.—and direct their efforts for my deliverance from thraldom, without stopping to inquire as to the correctness of their conjectures. This is absolutely grievous; and I feel it due to yourself and friends, and all concerned, to say at once, distinctly and publicly, that, in this matter, I have acted independently, and wholly on my own responsibility.

Yours, sincerely,

FREDERICK DOUGLASS.

PLSr: Lib., 23 July 1847. Reprinted in JNH, 10:734–35 (October 1925); Woodson, Mind of the Negro, 470–71; Foner, Life and Writings, 1:256.