FREDERICK DOUGLASS TO ISAAC POST

Lynn, Mass. 3 Feb[ruary 1848].

MY DEAR ISAAC,

I have now full[y] resolved to bring my family¹In 1848 Douglass’s household included his wife Anna Murray Douglass and his three sons, eight-year-old Lewis Henry, six-year-old Frederick, Jr., and four-year-old Charles Remond. Rosetta, his ten-year-old daughter, lived in Albany, where she attended the Mott sisters’ school, but she would join the rest of the Douglass family in Rochester at the end of the term. to Rochester with me—and shall probably reach there—~as early as one week from to morrow which is friday. I write to request that you will secure me a tenement²4 Alexander Street, Rochester, New York.—the rent of which will not exceed one hundred dollars per annum. I arrived here yesterday, having held meetings in Richfield, Troy, and Springfield—since I left West Winfield.³After speaking at an antislavery fair in West Winfield on 26 and 27 January 1848, Douglass lectured in nearby Richfield on 28 January, in Troy on 30 January, and in Springfield, Massachusetts, on 1 February. By 5 February Douglass was in Lynn, but it does not appear that he lectured there. In the 18 February 1848 issue of the North Star, Douglass reports having moved his family from Lynn to Rochester during the previous two weeks. Springfield (Mass) Daily Republican, 3, 8, 14 February 1848; NS, 4, 11, 18 February 1848. I saw 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. yesterday—he was well and made affectionate enquires for the health of your family. I regret to be absent from Rochester so long as I shall have to be this time—but the length

of time now may prevent a longer period in future. I am getting subscribers—which is no unimportant item.

With Love to all the members of your Dear family, I am yours ever—In great haste

FREDERICK DOUGLASS

ALS: Horatio Gates Warner Papers, NRU.