Lynn Mass.

April 27, 1847

My Dear Friend, I have been waiting for a line extending to me a welcome to Albany to see yourselfMott, Abigail

Abigail Mott (1803–50), lived in Albany, New York, and was a cousin to Lucretia Mott’s husband, James. Little is known of Abigail other than that she was a domestic companion to her sister, Lydia (1807–75), whom she assisted in antislavery activities. Lydia taught school in Philadelphia, where Susan B. Anthony was among her students, before moving to Albany in 1824. For several years she ran a “gentleman’s furnishing store” or shirtmaking business with her sister. Their home served as a waystation for fugitive slaves and a boardinghouse for itinerant lecturers on abolitionism and women’s rights. From 1845 to 1848, Douglass sent his daughter Rosetta to Albany to live and study with the Mott sisters. Although the two sisters supported Douglass early in his career, being among the first subscribers to the North Star, a quarrel whose source remains unknown alienated them from him sometime before the death of Abigail on 5 September 1850. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cody Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, ed. Ann D. Gordon, 3 vols. (New Brunswick, N.J., 1997–2003), 1:28; Lewis G. Hoffman, Hoffman’s Albany Directory, and City Register, for 1844–45 (Albany, N.Y., 1844), 255; idem, Hoffman’s Albany Directory, and City Register for 1848–49 (Albany, N.Y., 1848), 291; Thomas Clapp Cornell, Adam and Anne Mott, Their Ancestors and Descendants (Poughkeepsie, N.Y., 1890), 218–19, 283, 321; Merrill and Ruchames, Garrison Letters, 4:272n; Sterling, Ahead of Her Time, 159. , and sisterMott, Lydia

, and Rosetta the Pulse of my heartSprague, 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. the nonarrival of such a line leeds me to send you this I sincerely hope that my forwardness in expressing my intention has not offended you. I have now been at home one week and but for the many engagements which take up my time I should have made my appearance in Albany before this time. I have received a Kind letter from Jeremiah, requesting me to visit New Bedford whither he went soon after Learning my intention to come home. His course is somewhat incomprehensible. I learn he is now, aspireing to be a minister.

Yours Sincerely

Frederick Douglass