FREDERICK DOUGLASS TO OLIVER JOHNSON¹Vermont-born Oliver Johnson (1809–89), an abolitionist and journalist, published the semi-monthly Boston Christian Soldier (1832–33) from an office and printing press shared with William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator. In addition to serving as a substitute editor for the latter paper, Johnson also lectured for the New England Anti-Slavery Society. From 1837 to 1839, he lectured for the Rhode Island Anti-Slavery Society and sided with the Garrisonians on the rejection of political and religions means to achieve the end of slavery. In the 1840s, Johnson held several editorial positions outside of abolitionist circles. He worked for a time as an assistant to Horace Greeley on the New York Tribune, and briefly edited the Philadelphia Republic, then the Practical Christian, the organ of the utopian Hopedale Community in Milford, Massachusetts. He returned to abolitionist newspapers as editor of the Anti-Slavery Bugle (1849–51), then the Pennsylvania Freeman (1851–53). In 1853 he moved to New York City to accept the post of assistant editor of the American Anti-Slavery Society’s National Anti-Slavery Standard. In 1858 he succeeded Sydney Howard Gay as editor-in-chief and guided the paper through secession and the Civil War. Steven M. Raffo, A Biography of Oliver Johnson, Abolitionist and Reformer, 1809–1889 (Lewiston, N.Y., 2002); Merrill and Ruchames, Garrison Letters, 2:xxv–xxvi; ANB, 12:107–08; DAB, 5:756–58; NCAB, 2:319.

Rochester, [N.Y.] 4 Sept[ember] 1849.

MY DEAR JOHNSON:

Your kind letter honoring me with an invitation to be present at the contemplated Convention of the Young Men and Women of Ohio²On 21 and 23 September an estimated 5,000 or 6,000 gathered at Berlin, Ohio, for a convention of that state’s “Anti-Slavery Young Men and Women.” The convention featured Parker Pillsbury, Henry C. Wright, and Marius R. Robinson, but not Douglass. The gathering endorsed the Garrisonian disunionist position and criticized the Free Soil party for compromising abolitionist principles. Massachnsetts Anti-Slavery Society, Eighteenth Annual Report: Presented to the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society (Boston, 1850), 68–70. is before me. I have no words to tell you how glad I should be to attend that Convention—nor how much I regret my inability to do so. It is indeed soul-cheering to observe the activity and spirit which characterize the Old Organized Anti-Slavery movement in your State. I say Old Organized—though in truth there is no New Organized Anti-Slavery in Ohio or elsewhere. That, if it ever did exist, is now dead and buried. The glorious cause now rests upon the shoulders of men and women who honor principle more than men—and who are resolved to fight the battle of Freedom on the most disinterested grounds: turning neither to the right nor left—attacking

Church and State, Constitution and Government, principalities and powers, and wickedness in high places,³A reference to Eph. 6:12. making war upon everything that opposes the high and Heaven-blest cause in which they are engaged—without compromise and without concealment. With this class I am proud to be connected. As our old Anti-Slavery Pioneer once said, in a speech of his in New York, I am willing at all times to be known as a 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. Abolitionist.⁴Garrisonian abolitionists often referred to their namesake, William Lloyd Garrison, as the “pioneer” of their movement. Douglass probably heard Garrison make the quoted remark at one of the American Anti-Slavery Society’s anniversary meetings in New York City, which both attended faithfully from 1841 to 1845. Mayer, All on Fire, 347, 357. I must close, for I write in haste, by wishing the Convention all the harmony consistent with Free Speech, and every success in spreading Anti-Slavery truth in Ohio.

Yours, most sincerely

FREDERICK DOUGLASS

PLSr: NASS, 18 October 1849.