Pittsburgh, Nov. 5, 1848.

Dear Douglass:—I hastily left Philadelphia, on the afternoon of Saturday, the 28th ult., having been telegraphed for in consequence of indisposition in the family, and arrived here on Tuesday morning, the 31st, at five o'clock. One of the stage horses having given out, all the male passengers had to walk, and for some distance to push the coach up a considerable hill. The night being dark and the road muddy, it reminded me of "Paddy on the tow-path," working his passage by walking and leadingthe horses.

In this city, there is little or nothing doing in the cause of Anti-Slavery. I believe I am safe in saying that I never saw it at so low an ebb as now. True, there are some efforts being made by our ever active colored brethren here towards petitioning the ensuing Legislature for the elective franchise, or the restoration of that free suffrage of which they were so shamefully and unjustly robbed in 1838, by a mock Democratic (so called) "reform" (better deformed) State Convention, which acts were sanctioned by a few servile, pro-slavery Whigs, who, accustomed to "basely bend their knees to the dark spirit of slavery," could not resist to do the dirty work, in obedience to the commands of their Southern lords and masters. I have somewhere on record the names of this motley gang, and may hereafter publish them as an item of curiosity.

But aside from this action, I believe there is very little interest felt in the Anti-Slavery cause, even by the colored citizens. I am informed that when H. C. WrightWright, Henry Clarke

Abolitionist and pacifist Henry Clarke Wright (1797-1870) was one of Garrison's close associates. Reared in central New York, Wright served an apprenticeship as a hatmaker before studying at Andover Theological Seminary. In 1835 he joined the American Anti-Slavery Society and served as one of Theodore Dwight Weld's "seventy agents" until the executive board of the American Anti-Slavery Society removed him in 1837 because of his ultraist opinions. At about the same time he gave up his lecturing agency in the American Peace Society, which was also discomfited by his radicalism, and in 1838 helped found the New England Non-Resistance Society. Nonresistance, the foundation of Wright's reform philosophy, proclaimed the sovereignty of individual conscience and opposed all forms of coercion, violence, and the dominion of man over man. In theory Wright condoned violent resistance to slavery, though he personally eschewed violence. From 1842 to 1847 he traveled in Europe, lecturing on nonresistance and abolitionism. His avowal of antisabbatarian views in Scotland and his accusations (later retracted) that Free Churchmen were "drunkards" made Douglass chary of him. "Friend Wright has created against himself prejudices which I as an abolitionist do not feel myself called upon to withstand," Douglass wrote. Wright later turned to spiritualism and helped organize the Universal Peace Union in 1867. He died in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Douglass to Richard D. Webb, 10 November 1845, Anti-Slavery Collection, MB; Henry C. Wright to Douglass, 12 December 1846, in Lib., 29 January 1847; Henry C. Wright, Human Life: Illustrated in My Individual Experience as a Child, a Youth, and a Man (Boston, 1849); Peter Brock, Pacifism in the United Stales: From the Colonial Era to the First World War (Princeton, N.J., 1968), 516-18, 532-600, 926-27; Perry, Radical Abolitionism, 18-22, 60-61, 89-90, 159, 222-29, 234-38, 262, 278-82; ACAB, 6:623; NCAB, 2:232. and C. C. BurleighBurleigh, Charles Calistus

Charles Calistus Burleigh (1810-78) was born in Plainfield, Connecticut, and received his early schooling at Plainfield Academy. He had begun to study the law when an attack he published on the Connecticut "Black Law" attracted the attention of abolitionist Samuel J. May. Through May, Burleigh was offered the editorship of the Unionist, a new antislavery paper financed by Arthur Tappan. Burleigh was instrumental in protecting William Lloyd Garrison from a mob in Boston in October 1835, and shortly thereatler became a regular contributor to the Liberator. In the late 1830s Burleigh became one of the editors of the Pennsylvania Freeman, later the organ of the Eastern Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society. Active in a number of reform movements, Burleigh plunged into the antisabbatarian campaign after he was arrested in West Chester, Pennsylvania, in 1847 for selling antislavery literature on Sunday. In 1845 he published a pamphlet, Thoughts on the Death Penalty, condemning capital punishment. He participated in the woman suffrage conventions in Cleveland and New York City in 1854, and the American Equal Rights Association meeting in 1867. In the 1870s he joined his brother, William Henry, in the campaign for temperance reform. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage, 6 vols. (Rochester, 1881-1922), 1:148-51; C. B. Galbreath, "Anti-Slavery Movement in Columbiana County," Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly, 30: 389-91 (October 1921); ACAB, 1:455; DAB, 3:284-85. were here, so little interest was felt, that Temperance Hall, which was crowded to overflowing by S.Foster, Stephen Symonds

Born in Canterbury, New Hampshire, radical abolitionist Stephen Symonds Foster (1809-81) studied at Dartmouth College. In 1837, a year before his graduation, he helped to organize the New Hampshire Young Men's Anti-Slavery Society. Foster briefly attended Union Theological Seminary in New York, but by 1839 he had repudiated the ministry. He developed his criticisms of American churches most fully in The Brotherhood of Thieves; or, A True Picture of the American Church Clergy (1843). His practice of interrupting a church service to speak out against complicity with slavery frequently provoked violent reaction. While Foster and his wife, Abby Kelley, whom he married in 1815, were agents for the American Anti-Slavery Society for nearly twenty years, their relationship with the Garrisonians was at best one of strained cooperation. Although Foster believed that the Constitution was a proslavery document, he periodically dabbled in politics. In 1843-44 he endorsed the Liberty party. In the late 1850s, having altered his view of the nature of the Constitution, Foster sought to establish a disunion party "whose avowed aim. . .[would] be the overthrow of the government. . .& whose will. . .[would] be expressed through the ballot box." In the mid-1850s he also argued in favor of slave rebellion in his Revolution the Only Remedy for Slavery (1855). A proponent of distributing land to the freedmen, Foster was disappointed with federal Reconstruction policies. He devoted the last years of his life to agitating on behalf of temperance and women's rights. Parker Pillsbury, Acts of the Anti-Slavery Apostles (Concord, N.H., 1883), 123-55; Lillie B. Chace Wyman, "Reminiscences of Two Abolitionists," New England Magazine, 27:536-50 (January 1903); Parker Pillsbury, "Stephen Symonds Foster,'' Granite Monthly, 5:369-75 (August 1882); Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease, Bound with Them in Chains: A Biographical History of the Antislavery Movement (Westport, Conn., 1972), 191-217; Louis Filler, "Parker Pillsbury: An Anti-Slavery Apostle," NEQ, 19:315-37 (September 1946); ACAB, 2:514-15; NCAB, 2:328-29; DAB, 6:558-59. and A. K. FosterFoster, Abigail Kelley

Abby Kelley (1811-87) was born in Pelham village, Worcester County, Massachusetts, the seventh daughter of Wing Kelley, a farmer, and Diana Daniels, his second wife. Kelley was heavily influenced by her Quaker upbringing, but she later broke from the church because of its relative conservatism. Although her early schooling was scanty and deficient, Kelley saved and borrowed money in order to attend the New England Friends Boarding School in Providence, Rhode Island. At age nineteen she returned home and then began a career of teaching in Lynn, Massachusetts, where she became an abolitionist through the Lynn Female Anti-Slavery Society. In 1838 Kelley spoke at Pennsylvania Hall in Philadelphia as it was being attacked by an angry protesting mob. In the same year she joined the New England Anti-Slavery Society, previously a male-only organization. She began a career as a lecturer, at both women's and men's gatherings, especially in conservative Connecticut. Kelley married Stephen Symonds Foster, another radical abolitionist, on 21 December 1845. Traveling together on the reform circuit, they were among the most prominent antislavery lecturers in the 1840s and 1850s. Sterling, Ahead of Her Time; EAAH, 2:39-40. Perhaps the best known female American abolitionist. Abigail Kelley Foster (1810-87) was born in Pelham, Massachusetts. She was educated at the Friends School, Providence, Rhode Island, and later taught at a similar establishment in Lynn, Massachusetts. In 1837 she joined the antislavery movement and two years later, following the path blazed by Angelina Grimké, embarked on a career as an abolitionist lecturer. Her talents led Garrisonian abolitionists to choose her as an officer of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1840, provoking antifeminist abolitionists to bolt the organization. She continued to lecture and raise funds for the Garrisonians and in 1845 married Stephen S. Foster. another prominent abolitionist lecturer. In the 1850s both Fosters became outspoken advocates for women's rights in addition to abolition. Quarrels with Garrison over political action led Abby Foster and her husband to become inactive in the American Anti-Slavery Society in the late 1850s. Ill health forced her to be less active as a reformer after the Civil War, but in 1873 she attracted considerable publicity for woman suffrage by refusing to pay taxes on the family farm in protest against her disenfranchisement. The Fosters and Douglass had lectured together in Rhode Island in November and December 1841. Jane Hanna Pease, “The Freshness of Fanaticism: Abby Kelley Foster: An Essay in Reform" (PhD. diss., Univ. of Rochester, 1969); C. B. Galbreath, “Anti-Slavery Movement in Columbiana County," Ohio Archaeological and Historical Publications, 30: 391-92 (1921); DAB, 6: 542-43. , also by yourself and 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. , was not more than a third filled, at any of the meetings of these distinguished philanthropists and orators, the colored people probably composing a great part of these. What a falling off is here! I have held no meetings here yet, as I intend leaving on Wednesday morning next, to fill engagements in the following places, where I shall hold meetings and solicit subscribers and donations to the North Star and the cause.

On Friday evening, the 10th of November in Carlisle; Monday evening, the 13th, in Harrisburg; Tuesday, 14th, in Columbia; Wednesday, 15th, in Lancaster; Thursday, 16th, in Reading; Friday, 17th, in York; and on my way back to the West, I shall hold meetings in Lewistown, Hollidaysburg and Johnstown, and probably in Huntingdon, if I find it required. These meetings principally will be held among the colored people, as our people must be aroused to a proper sense of their own condition in this country, and the means necessary to change that condition.

In order effectually to accomplish this, we must meet them and converse with them, face to face, and thereby become acquainted with them, and they with us. I am satisfied, from experience and otherwise, that we must act and do for ourselves—we must, in order to accomplish so desirable an end as our elevation, morally, religiously and socially, become our own representatives. None can properly represent us but ourselves. The man who falls the victim of affliction, is the person best to describe his feelings, and the exact location of the disease. The physician who would prescribe a remedy, can do little without the aid of the sufferer in the first place.—Such, then, are we. The colored people are the sufferers; let them loudly call for and demand assistance, representing their own malady; the law—nay, public opinion, is the physician, who is bound to apply the remedy, which, by proper attention on our part, must eventually prove successful.

In Philadelphia, up to the time of my leaving, the meetings continued with unabated interest. On Friday eveing, the 37th ult., the last meeting, I held in the Shiloh Church, assisted by that distinguished patriot and orator, Henry H. Garnet, which, like all preceding meetings, was filled to the utmost capacity. The St. Mary St. Colored Presbyterian Church continues her meanness, keeping her doors closed against the cause of their suffering brethren, under false pretext. And while I would here mete out to a few of her petty despots, so-called elders and trustees, who prevent the Church from being opened, I have every reason to believe that the greater part, if not the whole of the congregation, desire Anti-Slavery meetings to be held in that church. The Pastor, Rev. B. F. Templeton, has not the control of the building, else there is no doubt the house would have been granted. When those hypocrites come down to a dying bed, when probably too late, they may see their error. I forgive those misguided, deluded brethren with all my heart, and in the earnestness of my soul, cry out, "Father, forgive them, they know not what they do!"

I would here remark, that I do not mean to implicate all of the elders and trustees of St. Mary St. Church, but those who meanly declared, against the sanction of all the rest, that we never should, by their consent, have the church to hold an Anti-Slavery meeting in.

There is a great work to be done in Philadelphia, and the people are eager and willing to recompense efficient, competent persons who may go among, and from time to time lecture to and bring before them those various subjects so essential to our elevation. Indeed, everywhere I go, I find that the only question among our people is, "What shall we do to better our condition?" This is a question of import, and only requires a proper answer to solve so great a mystery. The North Star is the herald through which this mystery is now being solved, and all that appears to be required is a proper person to bear the tidings into those parts where its rays have not yet been revealed.

While in Philadelphia, something like thirty fugitives, men, women, and children, passed through the city, effecting their escape from the American prison-house of bondage. Oh! it was a joyful sight to see in one meeting fourteen of these, our panting brethren and sisters, all sitting in front of the altar, some of them handsome young girls, whose mothers had long since been sold away from them, into the cotton fields and rice swamps of Alabama and Georgia.

There they sat in breathless silence, with countenances lighted with joy and surprise, as they for the first time witnessed the proceedings of an Anti-Slavery meeting; and with what astonishment did they gaze as they listened to our righteous denunciation of the man-degrading, heaven-daring man-thieves of this mock Republic; and when peal after peal, in words of living truth, the tones of eloquence escaped the lips of the distinguished Henry H. Garnet. It was a proud day for these our brethren, and one of them whispered in our ear, as he grasped our hand with gratitude, "We only want such men as you and Mr. Garnet in the South to head us!" I name these facts in order to show the man-thieves that the slave has still a soul within him, and we forewarn them to be careful how they attempt longer to trifle with and trample upon the unsubdued spirit of manhood. We forewarn him to look to Europe, and profit by the example there set. We beseech him to stop before it be too late. If he will continue his infamous deeds of outrage upon humanity, by and by, tortured and aggravated to desperation, the slave will rise in the majesty of manhood and the grandeur of his nature, when a terrible day it will be to the evil-doer and despoiler of his rights!

I intend everywhere to induce and urge the necessity among our people of the formation of Anti-Slavery Societies, for the assistance of newspapers and competent lecturers among us. While we do not mean to be exclusive, it is necessary to make our people dependant upon themselves, and cease to look to others to do for them. I would that they could all see and understand this principle as they should.

I want our ladies in particular to understand this matter properly. Among our white Anti-Slavery friends, the ladies, by their industry and perseverance, hold Fairs annually, by which their newspapers and faithful lecturers are sustained. Were it not for these efforts on the part of the ladies and societies, the Anti-Slavery papers which for years have done such great service in the cause of suffering humanity, would have long since ceased to exist, and the noble, untiring friends of the slave and man, who conducted them, been consigned to the seclusion of oblivion. My constant advice to our brethren shall be—Elevate yourselves!

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.