Pittsburgh, January 21, 1848.

Dear Douglass:—I promised to give you weekly advices of my movements, whether or not there were anything of interest to communicate.

On last evening, there was an interesting meeting held in Temperance Hall, a place well known to you, to continue the measures previously entered into, for the relief of Dr. Mitchell, of Indiana, Pa., a prominent Anti-Slavery friend of the Liberty Party, who was most unrighteously muleted in the heavy sum of fifteen hundred dollars, for no other crime under heaven than that of feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and giving shelter to the outcast. Nay, not so much as this: the Doctor did but permit the weary, outcast creatures to live in an old log cabin on his farmーhe employing them to labor. By a despotic set of Congress in ’93, this is made a penal offence; and the daring slaveholder may lay his claim at $1,500ーthe sum fixed by lawーand recover the same in any State, even North of Mason and Dixon’s line. And yet we are told by the pro-slavery minions, that "the North has nothing to do with slavery!"

The unblushing effrontery and daring impudence of the slaveocracy of this mock-republic, have really become alarming.ーWhither shall we go for succor?

My kind friend, Mrs. SWISSHELM, of the Visitor, was there; by her counsel and smiles, rendering aid and succor.

You have before this seen the announcement of the admittance of GEORGE BOYER VASHON, Esq.Vashon, George Boyer

George Boyer Vashon (1824–78), the son of abolitionist John Bethune Vashon, was an African American attorney and educator. In 1838, upon the family’s move from Carlisle, Pennsylvania, to Pittsburgh, Vashon became secretary of the first youth-oriented abolition organization, the Juvenile Anti-Slavery Society. At sixteen he entered Oberlin College in Ohio and became the first African American to receive a bachelor of arts degree from that school upon his graduation in 1844. Then, from 1845 to 1847, Vashon studied with Pittsburgh lawyer Walter Forward. When denied admission to the bar in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, because of his race, Vashon moved to New York and became the first African American admitted to that state’s bar. In February 1848 Vashon emigrated to Haiti, where he became a regular correspondent to Douglass’s North Star under the pseudonym "Harold," and taught Latin, Greek, and English at several schools and colleges. He returned to the United States to practice law in the fall of 1850. From 1854 to 1857, Vashon taught belles-lettres and mathematics at New York Central College in McGrawville, New York. Following the Civil War, he was the first African American teacher at Howard University and a solicitor for the Freedmen’s Bureau. In 1878, while teaching at Alcorn University in Rodney, Mississippi, Vashon died during a yellow fever epidemic. Washington (D.C.) National Era, 15 April 1847; Catherine M. Hanchett, “George Boyer Vashon, 1824–1878: Black Educator, Poet, Fighter for Equal Rights, Part One,” Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine, 68:205–10 (1985); DANB, 617; Black Abolitionist Papers, 3:322. , at the Bar of the Supreme Court of the State of New York. This is a rebuke to the Bar of Pittsburgh, for which there is no palliation.

Upon this subject, GreeleyGreeley, Horace

Horace Greeley (1811-72), journalist, reformer, and Republican politician, was the founder and lifelong editor of the New York Tribune. Born in Amherst, New Hampshire, Greeley moved to New York City in 1831 and became coeditor of a small literary periodical in 1834. With the sponsorship of William H. Seward and Thurlow Weed, Greeley soon entered the field of political journalism, editing Whig campaign weeklies in 1838 and again in 1840. The next year he launched the Tribune, which quickly outstripped its local competitors and attained a large circulation throughout the North. In addition to promoting a panoply of social causes ranging from Fourierism to the abolition of capital punishment, the Tribune under Greeley became the leading editorial voice of the Republican party during the 1850s. Openly hostile to abolitionism during the early 1840s, Greeley grew steadily more radical on the slavery issue, but his racial attitudes mirrored the ambivalence of many northern free-labor spokesmen. Greeley felt that blacks deserved legal equality and a fair chance to compete in the marketplace, but he doubted that African Americans as a group were capable of taking full advantage of such opportunities. Thus, during the 1840s and 1850s Greeley worked to extend equal suffrage to New York blacks while simultaneously accepting that they were an "indolent, improvident, servile, and licentious" race incapable of achieving social equality with whites. In his Recollections Greeley claims to have rejected colonization during the mid-1830s, but in fact he gave periodic support to emigrationist schemes throughout the antebellum era, and clashed repeatedly with Frederick Douglass, James McCune Smith, and other black leaders over the issue. Horace Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life (New York, 1868); Glyndon G. Van Deusen, Horace Greeley: Nineteenth-Century Crusader (Philadelphia, 1953); Ralph Ray Fahrney, Horace Greeley and the "Tribune" in the Civil War (Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 1936); Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, 262-63, 297-300; DAB, 7:528-34. , of the Tribune, has a word of withering rebuke to Pennsylvania. By the way, Greeley is a noble-hearted fellow; his only objectionable characteristic being the unerring fidelity with which he clings to that arch slaveholder, Henry ClayClay, Henry

Henry Clay (1777-1852), a native Virginian, entered politics during the 1790s in his adopted state of Kentucky and rose quickly to national prominence. As a congressman, senator, secretary of state, founder of the Whig party, and regular presidential candidate, Clay espoused broadly nationalistic programs designed to avoid sectional antagonism caused by the issue of slavery. He figured prominently in the debates that led to the passage of the Missouri Compromise, and he was a leading architect of the Compromise of 1850. His support of the American Colonization Society earned him the lasting hostility of Garrisonian abolitionists. In Congress, Clay vigorously opposed abolitionist petitions against slavery in the District of Columbia. Robert V. Remini, Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union (New York, 1991); Richard H. Sewell, Ballots for Freedom: Antislavery Politics in the United States, 1837-1860 (New York, 1976), 109; DAB, 4:73-79. . But for this, Greeley would be unexceptionable. It would seem, that such is Greeley’s love for Clay, that were he to fasten his monster grasp on him and his, he (Greeley) would still essay to justify him, on the ground that it must be right, or he would not have done so.

I see by a letter from the Scottish correspondent of the Liberator, that that miserable person, Stephen II, Gloucester, has proved himself a traitor, worthy of the deepest and most lasting execration. Let the burning indignation of a misrepresented and insulted people, "lash him naked through the world:" and for this purpose, I would suggest the calling of meetings in every place by the friends of the slave, irrespective of color, for the exposure of the deeds of this clerical assassin.

Liberia, the creature of Colonization, as you have seen, has declared her independence, (for which I commend her, that is, provided she is determined to exist without a master and overseer,) and for this, she is lauded to the skies as an evidence of the capacity of the colored man for self-government. The proud little Republic of Hayti has for the last fifty years fully demonstrated this truth; yet our quasi philanthropists are so far-sighted, that this fact is too near and apparent to come within the reach of their vision.

I see that you and Mr. Nell, as well as our dear friend Remond, have been fortunate in being among the chosen of the great Gerrit SmithSmith, Gerrit

Gerrit Smith (1797– 1874), a New York businessman and land speculator, became best known for his philanthropic work for such reform causes as temperance and abolition. Between 1828 and 1835, he donated large sums of money to the American Colonization Society, but abandoned that movement in 1835 when his sympathies shifted to the immediate abolitionists. In the 1840s, he gave approximately 140,000 acres of land in upstate New York to three thousand black settlers, thus qualifying them to vote. Smith was a founder and frequent candidate of the Liberty party, running for governor of New York on that ticket in 1840 and winning a seat in Congress in 1852. When the Free Soil merger with moderate antislavery Democrats and Whigs lured away many Liberty party supporters, Smith helped bankroll that organization until 1860. Smith befriended Douglass when the latter moved to Rochester, and Smith frequently helped finance Frederick Douglass’ Paper. Like Douglass, Smith supported John Brown, but psychological stress caused by the failure at Harpers Ferry brought on the first of a series of bipolar episodes that greatly reduced his subsequent reform activities. Ralph Volney Harlow, Gerrit Smith: Philanthropist and Reformer (1939; New York, 1972); Gerald Sorin, The New York Abolitionists: A Case Study of Political Radicalism (Westport, Conn., 1971), 269– 87; Lewis Perry, Radical Abolitionism: Anarchy and the Government of God in Antislavery Thought (Ithaca, N.Y., 1973), 170– 80; John R. McKivigan and Madeleine Leveille, “The ‘Black Dream’ of Gerrit Smith, New York Abolitionist,” Syracuse University Library Associates Courier, 20:61– 76 (Fall 1985); NCAB , 2:322– 23; DAB, 17:270– 71. . For this I am well pleased, as I do not think that his generosity could have been extended to any more meritorious.

The scintillating rays of the NORTH STAR, are just beginning to beam on the west; which brightens the horizon with cheering hopes.

Yours, in behalf of our oppressed and down-trodden countrymen,

M. R. D.Delany, Martin Robison

Born to a free mother and a slave father in Charlestown, in western Virginia, Martin Robison Delany (1812-85) was an editor, physician, and leading advocate of black emigration. In 1822 Delany's mother moved to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, where his father later joined them, and the young Delany attended a local school. In 1831 he moved to Pittsburgh where he worked as a barber, attended a school run by a black Methodist minister, and studied medicine, upgrading his occupation from “cupper and leecher“ to physician. Between 1843 and 1847, Delany was editor of the Mystery, a black Pittsburgh newspaper. For the next two years he served as co-editor of Doug1ass’s North Star and lectured and traveled extensively to gain new subscriptions for that paper. In 1850-51 Delany attended Harvard Medical College but, owing to protests from white students, was denied admission to the final term needed to complete his medical degree. The following year he wrote The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered (Philadelphia, 1852), in which he argued that emigration was the only remedy for the oppressed state of black Americans. When many black abolitionists, including Douglass, rejected Delany's position, he organized a series of National Emigration Conventions that met in 1854, 1856, and 1858. These assemblies created a permanent National Board of Commissioners, of which Delany was president and chief propagandist. In 1856 Delany moved to Chatham, Canada West, and three years later explored the Niger river valley in Africa looking for possible emigration sites. His novel Blake was serialized in the Weekly Anglo-African from November 1861 through May 1862. During the Civil War, Delany served the North first as a recruiter and examining surgeon and eventually as a major of the 104th U.S. Colored Troops. From 1865 to 1868 Delany was a Freedmen's Bureau officer in South Carolina and later was active in that state's politics, running unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor on the Independent Republican ticket in 1874. Ullman, Martin R. Delany, 52-103, 115-21, 140-71, 211-46; Dorothy Sterling, The Making of an Afro-American: Martin Robison Delany, 1812—1885 (Garden City, N.Y., 1971); Thomas Holt, Black Over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina during Reconstruction (Urbana, Ill., 1977), 74-75, 176-77; Miller, Search for a Black Nationality, 115-33, 171-83; Martin R. Delany, Blake; or, The Huts of America, ed. Floyd J. Miller (Boston, 1970), ix; DAB, 5: 219-20.