For Frederick Douglass' Paper.

BRIDGEPORT, Conn., Oct. 1, 1853.

MR. EDITOR:—A friend has sent me the
Aliened American, containing an "Address
on Odd Fellowship," by P. G. M. Gordon,
delivered at Newark Sept. 9th, 1853, before
G. U. O., and two other letters of the alphabet.

The address is smoothly written, here and
there betraying some reading, but is so dis
tinguished by "gold beating," fancy paint
ing and cant, that I must make it the occasion of relating, with your permission, my
own experience of Odd Fellowship, as a set
off of fact against fiction. I am not an Old
Fellow, but was an Odd Fellow's wife, and
what with my personal observation, woman's
curiosity, &c., &c., know more about "the
Order" than any one imagines.

Well, in 1843, when the late Peter Ogden
brought the first Dispensation to New York,
where I then resided, to organize the Philo
mathean Lodge, he found that city boasting
among its colored population of two Literary
Societies in active operation, giving public
lectures, debates, &c., to which, we women

folks were admitted. I can assure you those
were pleasant times! Our beaux gallanted
us to and from the meetings, (at one of which
I became acquainted with my first husband;)
and our social circles, especially at tea par
ties on Sunday evenings, felt the impluse
and the culture which flowed from the elo
quent and earnest discussions.

But these things came to an end: the last discussion I remember, was after Mr. Ogden's arrival with the Dispensation, and the subject was, "whether Odd Fellowhip would benefit our people." The leaders in the debates were, affirmative, James Fields, (now Doctor Fields of Toledo, Ohio, having turned his attention from renovating old clothes, to repairing sick bodies,) Wm. J. WilsonWilson, William Joseph ("Ethiop")

William Joseph Wilson (1818–?), a free black man from New Jersey, operated a bootmaking shop in New York City as early as the 1830s. In the 1840s he became a secondary school teacher and later a principal of a black school in Brooklyn. He was an activist on behalf of black education, encouraging access and attendance, and even opened his own library. Wilson also campaigned to secure the franchise for New York African Americans. He served as a member of the Committee of Thirteen, organized by New York black leaders to stop enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act. In the early 1850s Wilson’s letters appeared frequently in Frederick Douglass’ Paper, and Douglass referred to him as the newspaper’s “Brooklyn correspondent.” Wilson’s letters to the newspaper, published under the pseudonym “Ethiop,” were often part of an ongoing debate about the condition of blacks in New York and the United States. Wilson’s most frequent sparring partner in the war of letters was “Communipaw,” actually James McCune Smith, a prominent black physician in New York City. Carleton Mabee, Black Education in New York State: From Colonial to Modern Times (Syracuse, N.Y., 1979), 54, 63-67, 123, 129, 155, 158; Foner and Walker, Black State Conventions, 1:79-88; Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 87, 212, 229; Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, 4:144-45n. , (Ethiop,) the Downings, the VidalsVidal, Ulysses

, and P. A. Bell: in the negative, John J. Zuille, (Spectator?) Wm. P. Powell, and Dr. Smith, (CommunipawSmith, James McCune

James McCune Smith (1813–65), a prominent black physician, abolitionist, and writer, was born in New York City to an enslaved father and a self-emancipated mother. He attended the New York African Free School, but was denied admission to Columbia University, Geneva Medical College, and the New York Academy of Medicine. He turned to the University of Glasgow in Scotland, where he received a B.A. (1835), M.A. (1836), and M.D. (1837). Upon returning to New York, he opened a pharmacy and medical practice that catered to both blacks and whites. He became involved in the abolitionist movement, serving as an associate editor of the Colored American in 1839, contributed regularly to the Anglo-African Magazine, and wrote correspondence for the North Star and Frederick Douglass’ Paper under the pseudonym “Communipaw.” Smith also wrote the introduction to Douglass’s second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855). In 1861, Smith helped finance the revival of the Weekly Anglo-African to oppose black colonization and emigration, and he was a prominent member of the New York City Young Men’s Association, the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, and the New York African Society for Mutual Relief. He was the sole attending physician of the Society for the Promotion of Education Among Colored Children, a member and vestryman of St. Philip’s Episcopal Church, and a trustee of the New York Society for the Promotion of Education Among Colored Children. In 1863 Wilberforce College appointed Smith professor of anthropology, but illness kept him from assuming his post. Lib., 1 June 1838; FDP, 18 May 1855; Douglass Papers, ser. 2:7–19; Miller, Search for a Black Nationality, 243; Pease and Pease, They Who Would Be Free, 90–92, 103, 110; Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 115, 134; Rhoda G. Freeman, “The Free Negro in New York City in the Era before the Civil War” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1966), 40–42, 177, 186, 195, 200, 247, 276, 286, 325, 353, 393; DAB, 27:288–89. .) Well, the debate broke up in a row: the lodge was organized and others soon after.

By this time, I had been married nearly a year; and my husband, who had been on the fence during the debate, was, unfortunately, drawn into the vortex, and became a member of the Hamilton Lodge, No. 710.—How indelibly that number is engraven on my memory! Our domestic happiness was at an end! The long winter evenings he had formerly devoted to me were left drear and void by his continual absence. It seemed so hard, too, for I wielded his support and comfort more than ever! He was out every night; on Monday night he went to the Philomathean Lodge; on Tuesday to the Hamilton; Wednesday, the Hannibal; Thursday, the Council; Friday, to a Committee meeting on the regalia, or the constitution; Saturday night he had to sit up with a sick brother; and Sunday nights, instead of those pleasant tea drinkings, he sought male society, to discuss "the Order" in some segar or drug shop in the fifth ward. I cannot tell you how much I suffered from this continual neglect, this cruel slight, nor how another, who at least should have been beyond the reach of this dreadful Odd Fellowship, bore the marks of my suffering in an enfeebled constitution and an early grave. May God forgive that Order, I cannot!

Such, Sir, is my comment upon Mr. Gordon's remark, in regard to an Odd Fellow, that, "His duty to his Creator, to his family and himself, * * * rank among his first lessons." "First lessons," indeed! if it be a duty to neglect the family, to take money required for flannels, &c., and lay it out in costly velvet aprons and gilded gimcracks, then my first husband was a most apt pupil.

I write with present dread as well as with grief at the past, for they are trying to resuscitate the Lodge in this city, and I fear they may drag away the second husband of,

Yours afflictedly,

CHARLOTTE KCharlotte K (pseudonym)

Charlotte K— was a pseudonymous correspondent to Frederick Douglass’s Paper; her true identity is unknown. Little is known about this person other than that she corresponded from Pittsburgh. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., foreword to The Works of James McCune Smith: Black Intellectual and Abolitionist, ed. John Stauffer (New York, 2006), xxx; Christopher L. Webber, American to the Backbone: The Life of James W. C. Pennington, the Fugitive Slave Who Became One of the First Black Abolitionists (New York, 2011), 357; Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, 4:226n. ——.

P.S.—If you put this in your paper, I
will send further facts.