Frederick Douglass to Cha[rle]s Sumner, October 19, 1866
Rochester Oct. 19th 1866
Hon. Chas: Sumner:
My dear Sir: I send you my best thanks for a copy of your recent Address at Music Hall Boston. I had read it and reread parts of it before this in pamphlet came to hand. I wish I knew how to express my sense of its excellence without seeming extra[va]gant. My dear Sir, out of a full
heart, (I can only say what I have felt a thousand times before when you have spoken) I am deeply grateful to you for this last great word. All parts of this last effort of yours are excellent, but that in which you expose the fallacy that the recent Slaveholders can be trusted to legislate for the rights and interests of the
Freedmen is timely and telling. Until Redeemers come from the pit, instead of paradise—until the Temperance cause can be left to Rumsellers until the morals of Society can be safely committed to the care of those who habitually outrage all the decencies of life, the freedmen cannot safely be left to the care of their former masters. What ground of hope have we that the Second Session of the thirty ninth Congress will stand
on higher ground the first?
The health of no man in the land is matter of deeper solicitude than yours. Heaven Preserve you—for your own safe sake, but chiefly for the oppressed and for the country
Very truly and gratefully
Frederick Douglass