Columbus, April 15, 1848.

Dear Douglass:—I am now in Columbus, the capital of this State. The last letter I wrote to you was from a settlement some 3 miles south of Augusta, and being myself out of the reach of a post office, it was handed to a person to drop into the nearest office, which was at Augusta, Carroll county. — Whether or not it has reached you, I cannot say. My second letter to you, written near Hanover, was also delivered to a friend for mailing. I name these matters in order that should there be a remissness in my correspondence, you may know how to account for it; for sometimes our situation, and the regularity of these by-mails are such, that we must seize the first opportunity for mailing you letters.

Since I wrote you from Hanover, I have held meetings in the following places: On the evening I wrote in Hanover, in Augusta, at the Cyrus Settlement, Shaw's schoolhouse; Norristown, Carrollton, Leesburg, New Market, New Athens, and Zanesville, at some of which places I held several meetings during the day and night. In the neighborhood of Hanover and the Cyrus Settlement, there are a good number of colored residents, the most of whom are new settlers, but all industrious and respectable, the greater part farmers, and some mechanics among them, doing a good and promising business. The principal mechanics are carpenters and house joiners, and stone-cutters and masons; and I invariably find that the farmers and mechanics among our colored brethren, command the same civil respect of their neighbors that others do.—Their sociability is carried out to a much greater extent than possibly could or would be the case under other circumstances. It is no unfrequent occurrence for the colored residents to receive the civilities of their white neighbors to attend parties and weddings, and vice versa ; while in other capacities, such as doing their inferior domestic offices, they are neither noticed nor thought of. I wish to heaven that our brethren would see this matter as they should.

Of all the places I have visited, Leesburg in Carroll county, is the most Abolitionized. Even Salem cannot vie with it. Here I stopped with our noble friend J. W. Walker, who is doing a noble work, together with that excellent man, friend Shelby, also Jacob Millisack, and the "Sons and Daughters of Freedom," a most flourishing and excellent Anti-Slavery Association.

In Walker's parlor hang the following ornaments around the walls. I give them in the order in which they hang: Rev. O. Scott, Frederick Douglass, Benjamin Lundy, 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. , Wm. W. Brown, Lucretia Mott, Wendell Phillips, Branding Slaves on the Coast of Africa, George Thompson, the Hutchinsons, Abby Kelly Foster, Wm. Lloyd 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. , The Puritans hanging a cat on Monday for killing a rat on Sunday! Cassius M. ClayClay, Cassius Marcellus

Kentucky free-labor advocate Cassius Marcellus Clay (1810–1903) inherited seventeen slaves and extensive farm acreage in 1828. As a Whig representative in the state legislature, Clay began expounding an economic indictment of slavery. In 1843 he freed his slaves and hired them as free laborers. At the same time, he launched a campaign for gradual abolition addressed largely to the state’s non-slaveholding whites. In June 1845 Clay launched a weekly newspaper, the True American, in Lexington, to advocate the formation of a moderate antislavery party in Kentucky. After local residents forcibly dismantled his press and shipped it to Cincinnati, Clay published the True American in Louisville. Clay joined the U.S. Army in the Mexican-American War, a move denounced by abolitionists, who generally applauded Clay. At that time Clay sold the newspaper to John C. Vaughan, who suspended it in September 1846. Clay provided crucial financial support and physical protection to John G. Fee’s abolitionist colony at Berea in the 1850s. He served as U.S. ambassador to Russia (1861–69) and remained active in Kentucky politics during and after Reconstruction. David L. Smiley, Lion of White Hall: The Life of Cassius M. Clay (Madison, Wisc., 1962); Asa Earle Martin, The Anti-Slavery Movement in Kentucky Prior to 1850 (1918; New York, 1970), 112; Stanley Harrold, The Abolitionists and the South, 1831–1861 (Lexington, Ky., 1995), 28–29, 32–33, 40–41, 132–33; DAB, 4:169–70. , head downwards.

Such an influence has anti-slavery spread over the place, that is has embraced all, or nearly so, of the respectable young people of the village, who take as much pride in calling themselves Abolitionists as they possibly could of any popular title of the time-serving, pro-slavery minions of the land. Abolition with them is fashionable. It is true there are some pro-slaveites in the place, but like "bees without a sting," they hum, but cannot hurt. Leesburg is the first and only town that I have been in in Ohio, where the miserable effort at disparagement was not attempted towards me; if it were, the serpent is so nearly strangled, that his hissing cannot be heard. Thanks, for this, to Walker, Shelby, Millisack, and the Daughters and Sons of Freedom. It is heartily consoling to us wayworn laborers in the cause of humanity, especially those identified with the slave, to find on entering a place, that instead of being overburdened and weighed down, our hands are held up. To me, it is really cheering.

In Zanesville, I lectured to our colored brethren, they alone appearing to take an active interest in the anti-slavery effort. I held two meetings, and though there is quite a large population of them, I regret to say, that the young people do not present that promising feature, the foreboding of elevation, of useful and respectable attainments that is so desirable. The elder among the people, appear to hold their own; there being some few mechanics, business-men and farmers in and about the place, who have continued steadily forward; but the young men and women generally do not appear to have an ambition above a private-house, hotel-table, or body servant! the old may do, but if the young come not up with superior advantages, according to the superior opportunities, advantages or qualifications adequate to the demands of future society and posterity, whom they are to head as leaders and advisers, we must sink inevitably down into barbarism and obscurity, worse by far, if possible, than the present. The thought is enough almost to arouse our sepulchred fathers and mothers from their oriental catecombs! There are of course two or three exceptions on the part of the young men, which we cheerfully make, but do not know of one among the young women. If in this we are wrong, thankfully and gladly will we receive correction.

At Shaw's schoolhouse, in the Cyrus Settlement, I had the worst and only disorderly meeting of any that I have as yet held in this State, although a professedly "Quaker Settlement." It is true, that so far as the aged who were present were concerned, they were respectful and attentive; but the lads, girls and youth, being by far the majority, showed neither respect for the speaker, their parents, nor regard for the slave. Certainly their parents must have felt the keen rebuke given them by these ill-behaved youth, for the lack of good breeding manifested by them.—Several of the old persons endeavored to reprove them, but their admonitions were ridiculed. It is but just to state, that the leaders of this conduct were a certain Robert Shaw, a man of family and a farmer, also a colored man by the name of McPherson; both, of course, rank pro-slavery. The conduct of these men, especially the man Shaw, was insulting. Yoke these two colored and white wretches together, as the enemies of man's best interests, and "lash them naked through the world."

There are a large number of respectable and well-doing colored people in Columbus, some quite wealthy, among whom are many good mechanics, who find constant employment and plenty to do. Several are proprietors of business, and others find no difficulty in getting employment among their white fellow-citizens. The most prominent of these tradesmen are shoemakers, carpenters, painters, of whom there is a very large number, plasterers, bricklayers, and several others.—There are many owners of real estate in this city, decidedly more for the size of the place and number of the people, than any place I have ever yet visited. These things speak well for the spirit and industry of the colored Columbians, and I have been thus explicit in naming them, because, in my judgment, they are among the essential means by which, as a nominally free but oppressed people, we are to be elevated. We must become mechanics—we must become tradesmen—we must become farmers—we must be educated if we ever expect to become elevated, even after we have gained our liberty. I do not desire it to be thought that I look upon these things as essential to liberty and freedom as such, as a fundamental basis, but I wish to be distinctly understood when I repeat that they are essential to elevation. Whatever is necessary for others, is necessary for us. These things are necessary for the elevation of others, therefore, they are necessary for our elevation. I would that our people could be made sensible of these facts, and fewer of them would be found in the domestic departments of hotels and private families, as a matter of choice, than there now are.

I should have stated that there are a number of persons in this city who own good farms in the country.

The cause of education among them is not so forward as I could wish, but they are generally intelligent, having two or three good common schools, supported mainly by themselves, the odious provisions of the infernal black-laws prohibiting a large portion of the colored children from a participation in the benefits of the State school fund, as provided by law. The last session of the Legislature made a kind of provision, which is so pro-slavery in its character that I consider the chances worse than before. It has completely shut the door against the colored people for years. The act provides that where there are less than twenty colored children in any school district, they may enter the same school in that district with the white children, enjoying all the privileges of the school, provided there is no objection on the part of any white tax-payer, or any person sending his children to the same school! In a word, there must be an unanimous consent of all the tax-payers and parents who send children in that district, before a colored child can be permitted to go. In all cases where there are over twenty colored children, they must have a separate school, with their own directors and teachers, when the State will allow to be appropriated the amount of school tax assessed on the number of colored residents in that district to said colored school, which assessment, I have learned on inquiry, in the school district in the State, will be sufficient for the education of one dozen of children one quarter!

With the present prejudices of the whites, according to this act of the Legislature of Ohio, cannot every one see that no colored children will ever be educated in the common schools of Ohio? The tendency of the act is to deceive the common people, and lull to an indifference the colored people themselves, and the friends of freedom and equal rights, by inducing them to believe that equal justice had been done to the colored people. Let their acts of wickedness and despotism be exposed upon the house-top, until they shall learn to respect the rights of man, and administer equal and even-handed justice to all.

The females among the colored people, also many, are doing their part. There are two teachers, and many seamstresses among them, who make their livelihood by their profession. This also is praiseworthy. The population of Columbus is 10,000 souls; colored 1,000, or one-tenth of the whole city.—Anti-Slavery appears to be at low tide here, except among the colored people, and even some of them are pro-slavery. This, however, in the main, I look upon as more the effects of ignorance than wickedness. They require anti-slavery light doubtless.

Monday, April 17th. — Visited the Blind Asylum; Superintendant, Mr. McMillen.—This gentleman has recently taken charge of the institution, and is quite polite. The inmates number 68 pupils—young women and men, lads and lasses. Among them, and decidedly the most attractive and intelligent, is Lucinda Shaw, from Pickaway county. She acted as my guide and conductor, (this being her office,) taking me through all parts of the Asylum, showing me everything connected with it. One would scarcely believe with what facility she trips from room to room, and apartment to apartment, telling to a certainty what is carried on here and what there, pointing out the different articles, distinguishing their quality, and naming their prices. When ascending or descending a stairway, especially the latter, I invariably found myself far in the rear, and her waiting at the threshold for my arrival? She sang for my entertainment, and played sweetly upon the piano. Her singing was painfully effective—her fast air being the "Rose-bud," some of the words of which lamented its being "nipped in the bud," coming as it did as the instant of the reception of the intelligence of the death of my dear little daughter, appeared like piercing my heart, with a golden spear, or riddling my breast with precious stones! It seemed as though the innocent and unconscious young Lucinda, selected that song intentionally. It was painfully singular how I enjoyed it. I would that she had sung it again, and yet I would that she had not sung it at all. The institution is well-conducted, well-furnished and handsome: the pupils all well dressed, clean and cheerful. But whatever the other merits of this institution, the poor blind colored youth can find no sympathy there.

This evening, delivered a lecture before an institution of colored ladies and gentlemen.—Tomorrow evening to lecture in the Colored Methodist Church.

Tuesday evening, April 18th, lectured in the colored Methodist Church, to a tolerable audience. There is some pro-slavery among the colored people here, and, I am fearful, not the best of union. But of this I may probably speak again. I leave for Circleville and Chilecothe.

Yours for God and humanity,

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.

P.S.—There has been a fall of snow, and a cold north-westerly winterly blast. Great fears for the fruit.

M. R. D.