HENRY BUSH¹Best remembered as the husband of early women’s rights leader Abigail Norton Bush, Henry Bush (1805–?) was a Rochester stove manufacturer. Abigail Bush chaired the Rochester Woman’s Rights Convention of 1848, becoming the first woman to preside over a women’s rights convention, and held the president’s office of the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society in 1849. In 1850 Henry Bush left his wife and five children in Rochester to search for gold in California. Two years later, the family reunited in the West. 1850 US. Census, Madison County, Rochester, Eighth Ward, 387; Directory for Rochester, [for 1851–52], 86; Hewitt, Women’s Activism and Social Change, 106–07, 121–22, 131, 144. TO FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Rochester, [N.Y.] 6 Jan[uary] 184[9].²The printed letter erroneously lists the year as 1848.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS—

DEAR SIR:—

A good name is better than precious ointment;³Eccles. 7:1. and when one assails it without just cause or provocation, he does me harm, and himself no good, but most, from the nature of the case, do harm to himself also. I consider your attack under the proceedings of the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society upon me, uncalled for, unkind, unchristian, and untrue;⁴At the annual meeting of the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society, held in Rochester on 2 January 1849, Henry Bush unsuccessfully opposed a motion to restrict voting on all resolutions to members of the society. Douglass favored a stricter organization of the society’s operations and in a North Star editorial accused Bush of attempting to “embarrass and hinder [the society’s] happy operation.” NS, 5, 26 January, 5 February 1849. and as your paper professes to be the organ of the Western N.Y. Anti-Slavery Society, and to give an impartial history of its proceedings; I call upon you to recall what you have said, in as public a manner as you gave publicity to my name in the article referred to, or have the matter referred to the Executive Committee for their decision, and then publish their proceedings, and I will be satisfied; but as things are, I am unwilling to rest under the imputation.

Yours for the right and freedom of all,

H. BUSH.

PLSr: NS, 12 January 1849.