FREDERICK DOUGLASS TO ELIZABETH PEASE

Rochester, [N.Y.] 8 Nov[ember 18]49.

MY DEAR FRIENDPease, Elizabeth

Elizabeth Pease (1807–97), from Darlington, in the north of England, was the daughter of the first Quaker member of Parliament. She organized one of the first antislavery societies in England and was among the foremost correspondents between the American and British abolitionist movements. At the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840, she allied with the Garrisonians and began to support an agenda that included rights for women. Her vision expanded to encompass not only the emancipation of all slaves, but also other issues of social justice, including the humane treatment of the native people of India, independence for eastern and central European nations in the Austro-Hungarian empire, opposition to the opium trade, and support for laws to benefit the poor in England. In 1853 she married astronomer John Pringle Nichol, but was widowed six years later. She continued her activism and interest in all aspects of emancipation until her death in 1897. Anna M. Stoddard, Elizabeth Pease Nichol (London, 1899); Karen I. Halbersleben, Women's Participation in the British Antislavery Movement, 1824–1865 (Lewiston, N.Y., 1993), 39, 65, 70, 78, 105, 156, 182, 189–90. :

I take up my pen to thank you for the generous donation which you have kindly sent me by the the hand of our mutual Friend Eliza Nicholson of Carlisle. I am the more grateful because you had already contributed the amount which you had decided to give for this year. I take it as marked kindness that you have thus thought me worthy of your encouragement and support.

The North Star has had a multitude of difficulties to struggle with—perhaps greater than any of my English friends can well understand. I commenced the paper against the advice of many of my best friends—and in this I may have acted unwisely, since they of course do not feel that interest in its success that my former and present relations to them led me to expect. Of the motives which led me to commence the paper, I need say but little. The general contempt with which my people are regarded—the low estimate entertained of the negro’s mental and moral qualities among the white people of this land—and the absence of any very striking confutations of the debassing and depressing theories universally prevailant against us and the knowlege that the colored people feel a hesitancy about speaking through columns of papers of conducted by white persons led me to establish this paper as a means of bring out their power—in such a manner as to silence hurtful misrepresentations—and to remove the cruel and unnatural prejudices which may be safely set down as the most powerful agents in upholding slavery in this country. How far the motive has been justified by the results I may leave others to decide. I am however con-

vinced that the effort has not wholly failed. Good lasting good has been done by the paper and I am resolved that it shall continue while I have anything like the necessary means for continuing it.

My own puny abilities as a writer have been heavily taxed and I have performed my part with very little credit but then I have done the best I could and reason can ask no more. Without ever having had a days schooling and with no regular or sound knowlege of the rules of grammer—and very little reading I have managed to keep my paper up nearly two years with very little complaint against me either from its readers or a sneering contemporaneous press—although the latter have uniformly treated others rudely on this [score]. Upon the whole I feel a degree of complacency on account of the respect and consideration thus far extended to me by the press and public generally. Especially do I feel gratified for the spirit with which the enterprize is regarded by the people for whose benefit the paper was established. Most of the papers started by colored persons had failed its establishment, and as a consequence our people were generally disheartened and hopeless—and of course they feared that the fate which had consigned all others to defeat would also make mine a failure. It is Therefore a matter of surprise and gratification that the paper continues and the more intelligent and respectible among us are exerting themseles hopefully to keep the paper in existense. This is particularly the case with the colored people in Philadelphia who are industriously laboring to put paper on a permenant footing.

Believe me Dear friend—I shall do my utmost honorably to serve the cause of my race—and thereby to merit your esteem and approbation.

My family—wifeDouglass, Anna Murray

Anna Murray Douglass (c. 1813-82), Douglass’s first wife, was born free in Denton, Maryland. She was the eighth child of Bambarra and Mary Murray, slaves who had been manumitted shortly before her birth. At seventeen she moved to Baltimore, where she worked as a domestic and met Douglass at meetings of the East Baltimore Mental Improvement Society. In 1838, Murray helped Douglass finance his escape, and she joined him in New York City, where they were married on 15 September 1838. During Douglass’s first tour of the British Isles (1845-47), she remained in Lynn, Massachusetts, where she supported the family by binding shoes. She gained a reputation for frugality and skillful household management, qualities that would contribute greatly to her family’s financial prosperity over the years. A member of the Lynn Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society and a regular participant in the annual antislavery bazaars in Boston, she continued her antislavery activities after moving to Rochester in 1847. Unlettered, reserved, and, according to her husband, never completely at ease in white company, she seldom appeared at public functions with Douglass. She was nevertheless affectionately remembered by her husband’s associates as a “warm” and “hospitable” hostess at their home. On 9 July 1882, Anna Douglass suffered an attack of paralysis in Washington, D.C., and died there on 4 August. Lib., 18 November, 2 December 1853; Philadelphia Christian Recorder, 20 July 1882; Washington (D.C.) Post, 5 August 1882; Rosetta Douglass Sprague, My Mother as I Recall Her: A Paper Delivered before the Anna Murray Douglass Union, W.C.T.U., May 10, 1900 (1900; Washington, D.C., 1923); Jane Marsh Parker, “Reminiscences of Frederick Douglass,” Outlook, 51:552-53 (6 April 1895); Dorothy Sterling, ed., We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1984), 132-37; Julie R. Nelson, “The Best of Intentions: Anna Murray Douglass, Helen Pitts Douglass, and the Challenge of Social Equality,’ Proteus: A Journal of Ideas, 12:39-42 (Spring 1995); Sylvia Lyons Render, “Afro-American Women: The Outstanding and the Obscure,” Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress, 32:306-10 (October 1975). ¹Anna Douglass. and five children²Rosetta, Lewis Henry, Charles Remond, Frederick, Jr., and Annie Douglass. are all well. I have three boys and two girls. Two Boy LewisDouglass, Lewis Henry

Lewis Henry Douglass (1840-1908), the second child and eldest son of Frederick and Anna Murray Douglass, was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Educated in the schools of Rochester, New York, he learned the printer's trade as a boy working in the North Star office. In 1863 he enlisted in the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry, serving as the regiment's sergeant major and seeing action at the Battle of Fort Wagner, South Carolina, in July I863. Disabled, he was discharged in 1864. He was a member, along with his father, of the black delegation that interviewed President Andrew Johnson on 7 February 1866. Later that year, after failing to obtain employment as a printer in Rochester because of racial discrimination, he moved to Colorado. There he briefly worked for the Denver Daily Gazette until refused membership in the local printers' union because he was “a colored man." In 1869 he took employment as a compositor at the Government Printing Office in Washington, D.C. When he attempted to join the Columbia Typographical Union, No. 100, a controlling minority of the membership blocked his election at their May 1869 meeting. For the record, the opposition was based not on his color but on reports that Douglass had “ratted” (worked as a nonunion printer for below-scale wages) in Denver. Dougla,s. who remained at the Printing Office throughout his widely publicized effort to break the union's color barrier, denied the allegation but to no avail. The factionalized union continued to table his application along with those of other black printers (including Frederick Douglass, Jr.) as late as 1871. By then Lewis and Frederick, Jr., had become publishers of the Washington New [National] Era, of which their father was the editor. In 1872-73 Lewis Douglass served on the Legislative Council of the District of Columbia. By the 1890s he was a successful realtor in his adopted city. On 7 October 1869 he married Helen Amelia Loguen, daughter of Reverend Jermain W. Loguen. Lewis H. Douglass to Frederick Douglass, 29 October 1866, General Correspondence File, reel 2, frames 220-22, FD Papers, DLC; Lewis H. Douglass to D. W. Flynn, 24 May 1869, in San Francisco Elevator, 11 June 1869; NASS, 22 May 1869; Rochester Union and Advertiser, 6 August 1869; William H. Boyd, comp., Boyd’s Directory of the District of Columbia, . . . 1873 (Washington, D.C. 1873), 525; Boyd's Directory, 1893, 371; James M. Gregory, Frederick Douglass, the Orator (1893; New York, 1971), 102-03; Foner and Lewis, Black Worker, 1: 370, 374-83. and FredkDouglass, Frederick Jr. (Douglass's son)

Frederick Douglass, Jr. (1842-92), was born in Lynn, Massachusetts, the second son of Frederick and Anna Murray Douglass. Throughout his adult life Frederick, Jr., struggled to achieve success within the same industries as his famous father. For years he tried unsuccessfully to obtain membership in the typographical union; he did, however, work with several newspapers, including the New National Era. He was also a frequent contributor to other newspapers, such as the Detroit Plaindealer, the New York Times, and Baltimore's National Leader, where he worked at the time of his death. He was the only of Douglass's sons not to enlist in the Union army. Henry O. Waggoner, a close friend of his father's, took Frederick, Jr., and his brother Lewis to Denver in 1866, to help them establish their careers. Ultimately their attempts failed, and the two returned east. During an outbreak of influenza in 1890, his wife, Virginia, died. His own son, Frederick Douglass III, as well as several other of the couple's children died at an early age. Frederick, Jr., succumbed to a prolonged and painful illness in July 1892. New York Times, 24 September 1876; Washington (D.C.) Bee, 30 July 1892; Detroit Plaindealer, 12 August 1892; McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 97, 145, 248-49, 258, 272, 342, 365. go to school—and my DaughterSprague, Rosetta Douglass

Rosetta Douglass Sprague (1839–1906), the first child of Anna and Frederick Douglass, was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, on 24 June 1839. In her childhood, Rosetta wrote and read letters for her mother, whom she assisted with housework and with piecework for the shoe factories in Lynn, Massachusetts. Her father sent Rosetta to school at age seven in Albany, New York, where she lived with Abigail and Lydia Mott. When the Douglass family moved to Rochester, Rosetta began attending the Seward Seminary, where her presence offended the parents of one of the white students and led to her segregation from the other pupils. Her father, in a fury, removed Rosetta from the school and hired a private tutor for his daughter. Rosetta, along with her three brothers, then led other students in the efforts to desegregate Rochester’s public school system. From 1854 to 1855, Rosetta attended Oberlin College preparatory school, one of the first institutions of higher education to accept African Americans and women. She became a teacher in Philadelphia and Salem, Massachusetts, until her marriage in 1863 to Nathan Sprague, with whom she had seven children. Before her death in 1906, she wrote a memoir of her mother that remains one of the most complete documents of Anna Murray Douglass’s life. Rosetta Douglass Sprague, My Mother as I Recall Her: A Paper Read before the Anna Murray Douglass Union, W.C.T.U., May 10, 1900 (1900; Washington, D.C., 1923); Dorothy Sterling, ed., We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1984), 132–45; Ellen N. Lawson and Marlene Merrill, “The Antebellum ‘Talented Thousandth’: Black College Students at Oberlin before the Civil War,” Journal of Negro Education, 52: 145 (Spring 1983); Miriam DeCosta-Willis, “Smoothing the Tucks in Father’s Linen: The Women of Cedar Hill,” Sage, 4: 30–33 (Fall 1987); Sylvia Lyons Render, “Afro-American Women: The Outstanding and the Obscure,” Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress, 32: 306–10 (October 1975), 307–10. ³Rosetta Douglass. of whom you have heard—is also regularly going to school.

I am most sincerely yours,

FREDERICK DOUGLASS

ALS: Anti-Slavery Collection, MB. PLSr: Foner, Life and Writings, 1:411–12.