Detroit, June 29, 1848.

Frederick Douglass: My dear Sir,—I am on my return from a visit to my brother-in-law, James G. Birney. His health has been much impaired for several years, and it was not probable that I should ever see him, unless I should visit him. I found him residing at Lower Saginau. It is now in the heart of a wilderness: but in a dozen years it will be a town of no little importance. The commerce of the noble Saginau and of its partially navigable tributaries, will make it such. These streams drain a country of very great fertility, and abounding in good pine timber. Many lumbermen in the State of New York, have purchased land of me. They wou’d have done far better, had they made their lumbering establishments at Lower Saginau.

But I take up my pen to testify, in a few words, to the good character of the colored people of this city. They number one thousand, and are as a class, industrious, frugal, temperate, upright and intelligent. I have spent a Sabbath with them. In the morning, I attended their Methodist, and in the afternoon, their Baptist church. Mr. Gardner is the pastor of the former, and Mr. Davis of the latter. Mr. Davis is a neat, beautiful, and able writer. He formerly lived in Buffalo. He is a native of Maine.

I find several acquaintances among the colored people of this cityーnamely, Robert Banks, George R. Symes, Lewis Haydon, and Henry Bibb and his wife. Banks and Symes were members of the colored school, which was sustained for several years in my little village. They are very worthy men. Mr. Bibbs is preparing to go to England this Fall. His special employment there will be to advocate the disuse of the products of slave labor. His worthy wife will probably accompany him. Among the most estimable colored men of this city is Mr. George Baptist. I owe him much for his kind and useful attention to me.

The colored people of this city justify themselves for congregating here, instead of scattering in the interior, on the ground that they can thereby better protect themselves from men-stealers, and can thereby better protect from men-stealers the almost daily arriving fugitives from the Southern prison-house. A large share of the colored people of this city are fugitive slaves.

What a land is this, in which the poor and the weak are obliged to congregate themselves together in order to keep at bay the rich and the strong, who would steal them! You will perhaps say, "What a constitution cursed this land!" I would rather say, "What a people cursed this land!" Such a people, even though their Constitution had been dropped down from Heaven, would interpret it in behalf of justifying the oppression and devouring the poor. They have already in the Bible a Heaven-sent Constitution; and thus wickedly and blasphemously do they interpret it.

With great regard,

Your friend and brother,

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. .