Harrisburg, Pa., Nov. 18, 1848.

Dear Douglass:—I arrived here on Tuesday morning the 14th, having left Pittsburg Friday the 10th. On Monday evening, I held a meeting in Carlisle, 18 miles west of here, where I endeavored to spread light and truth on the great and important subject of the Elevation of the colored citizens of this oppressive Republic, and circulate the North Star as a medium and means of reaching them and the public at large, when they can be reached by no other instrumentality.

Here they gave the best of attention, the house being as well filled as could be expected under the circumstances, they being but few in number in the place. The people here, with but one exception, are poor, and consequently unable to do much. Indeed, this adjective may be applied in general terms to our people, but here I apply it in a comparative sense to the masses, which makes the application even more positive. Hence, they did all they possibly could—gave the "widow's mite."

Notwithstanding this, there is an excellent school for colored children, supported by the public fund, taught by Miss Bell, an amiable and quite accomplished teacher—one who is qualified to teach the children the higher as well as the practical branches of education, which has long been and is still much wanted in many of the schools in this country established for colored children.

Miss Bell took several classes through their various exercises, several of which had embraced the branches upon which they were examined as late as September, but three months since, many of the pupils of which are quite small; yet all, both male and female, went through their task with an ease and pleasantness which satisfied me that they were familiar with their subjects, which familiarity is absolutely necessary before the knowledge obtained can be of practical use. In arithmetic, they wrote down upon the black-board and worked out sums with the facility of a counting-house clerk—geography, grammar and Bible studies, all being demonstrated with equal satisfaction.

How different will be the intelligence of these pupils, when leaving school, to those generally dismissed from the common schools among us, having finished their education, or "done going to school," as it is properly termed; when on examination of the scholar, you find that he or she can "read and write," and that too in the most incorrect and imperfect manner, totally incapable of making a practical application of any branch of study which they profess to have gone through with at school. Incredible as this may appear to those unacquainted with schools kept for colored children, yet it is nevertheless true, that nine-tenths of our youth are turned out upon the world as having finished their education, with such an education as this, which in all conscience will be acknowledged a very bad education. Seldom can be found in our country towns and small cities, a colored youth or maiden who can practically apply to business purposes the arithmetic they have learned at school, or who is able to write a correct sentence. Even the first rule of composition is generally violated by them—which is, to begin every sentence with a capital letter; also, that which may be called the second, and one of the most obvious rules—that the pronoun I, and all proper or particular names, as the name of God and all human beings, as well as many other things, which the sense will suggest to any one who has simply read these rules, should be written with a capital.

You may think it somewhat singular, and altogether misplaced, to lecture the readers of the North Star, in an editorial corresondence on English grammar, but when you reflect on the manner in which we, as conductors of a public press, are continually bored by young writers, aspirants for literary fame, who openly and palpably violate all these rules, you cannot think the strictures amiss in this place.

Miss Bell has frequently been offered a better school and higher salary, to teach white children, but refuses to leave the colored school on any conditions. Some of Miss Bell's pronunciations were not in accordance with my taste or idea of euphony; for instance, too much stress was placed on the definite article wherever it occurred in the reading, thus—"The Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Spreak unto the children of Israel," &c.; also in reading, I thought that their punctuations were not properly observed. However, as accent and punctuation are among the most arbitrary rules of our language, especially the former, continually undergoing changes, I consider this no very serious matter, as doubtless Miss Bell teaches according to some rule, adopting the system of some literary standard or lexicographer. Thanks, many thanks, from the friends of humanity, especially the colored people, to Miss Bell, for the excellent manner in which she conducts this school of the oppressed children of Carlisle. Her name will be treasured up in the bosoms of the grateful, to be honored and revered by the rising generation.

I abide here with that well-tried friend of his oppressed brethren, the friend of God and humanity, Rev. W. Webb, and lady and interesting family. Such a family, in such a place, has never been half appreciated by those with whom they are surrounded. The children of this family are intelligent and interesting in a high degree, and will challenge comparison with, and might well put to blush, those of their Anglo-Saxon neighbors for good behavior. No better evidence of the excellence of the character of a family is required than the good conduct of the children.

In Harrisburg, I have held three meetings—on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday evenings—endeavoring to awaken an interest among our brethren in their own welfare, by showing them the necessity of acting and doing for themselves—that we must, in fact, become our own representatives in presenting our own claims, and making known our own wrongs.

Here there is a good school kept by our mutual friend, Mr. John Wolf, which school I visited, finding many pupils of various sizes present, but had not an opportunity of testing their qualifications. Mr. Wolf, I am informed, is a gentleman of fine attainments, and is much indebted to our able and talented contributor, W. Whipper, Esq., of Columbia, for the direction of his mind. This of itself is a recommendation to him.

The colored population of this borough is estimated at between seven and eight hundred, among whom are many intelligent, industrious people, several of whom have long been noted for their assiduity in business; yet notwithstanding, there is an apathy and indifference about our people in this place which tests my ingenuity to account for. This is apparent among the young people generally, and the females in particular, though there are many excellent exceptions. Of all the places I have yet visited, save the single exception of Springfield, Ohio, which still bears the palm, this place (Harrisburg) I found the most difficult to awaken a general interest among the people. Perhaps were a saint to descend and attempt to speak to them, there would be young women in the assembly who would laugh and make sport on his first appearance; and nothing but his scathing rebuke of such conduct would prove an effectual remedy. Hence, if they cannot come to misbehave, they may not come at all; so that, of a population of seven or eight hundred, I had an average of fifty, as after the first night the giddy did not come.

One of the great evils among our people in the holding of their meetings, is late commencing. When other meetings are nearly ready to let out, ours are but commencing.—This custom is so common, that I found it impossible to get anything like an audience, even of the few who did attend, until half-past eight o'clock. This is sad, and I earnestly suggest to our people everywhere, an immediate change. The common excuse is, that they cannot get out earlier; but with this I differ, and attribute the indifference to a want of interest, from the fact, that let there be a protracted church meetings, a "party" or any other gathering, in which they take an interest, and one must go very early to get a seat at all. Heaven grant that we may be aroused to a sense of our true condition, and stimulated to effort adequate to a remedy.

There are several owners of real estate in Harrisburg; yet the real wealth among them, especially the old residents, is fast changing hands, passing into those of the whites, upon which they are growing wealthy, with fortunes to leave for their children.

An old and respectable citizen, who by years of industry and sleepless nights, had acquired a good propery on Market street, which in the last two years he had much improved, has now been embezzled out of it by a process of legal gambling, a vice with which the honest, unsuspecting old colored gentleman was unacquainted. I perceive, also, that the estate of the late Ezekiel Carter, on the same street, and nearly opposite, has been wrested from the heirs, by a similar process, as I am informed; and now there is a row, consisting of seven or eight of the finest pressed-brick dwellings in the capital, upon the spot; in one of which houses resides one of the most distinguished statesmen in the commonwealth. This is an evil of long endurance among our people—the apparent incapacity to hold real estate after they obtain it; but the defect lies in deficiency of their qualification to do and attend to business for themselves. This is an evil of immense magnitude, and should also be speedily remedied.

I cannot see that in twenty years, (from 1828 to 1848,) at which time, being then a boy, I resided in that place, Harrisburg has increased the least in size. The only improvement is in some of the buildings, old frames having given place to houses of a more durable material. By the politeness of two gentlemen, and the civility of the warden who attends the capital, I was conducted through both Houses of State, and up to the dome, where I had a fine prospect of the whole borough, distinguishing every public building, and the surrounding country far in the distance. The general demeanor of the whites is quite civil compared with their conduct towards Douglass 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. in '46, two years since; but do not think I could say as much, had I attempted to hold a meeting in the Court House, to discuss the subject of American slavery, or the merits of Taylor, Cass, and Van Buren for the Presidency.—Indeed, I had a fair specimen in the conduct of several of the hotel keepers but two weeks ago, none of whom would entertain me for the evening, although the carrs arrived at near twelve o'clock at night, staying until 7 next morning on the westward route.

I make my home here with Mr. John Williams, and his intelligent lady, who most kindly received me the night that stupid ignorance and wicked prejudice debarred me from shelter, and at whose door the anti-slavery latch-string always hangs out. Mr. and Mrs. Williams take high anti-slavery ground, feeling closely identified with their people, and stand ready at any time, can they but get assistance, to enter into measures for the support of the cause, and those who are faithfully laboring for our elevation. To Mr. John Wolf and his amiable, intelligent lady, whose house also keeps the welcome knocker to the Anti-Slavery pilgrim on the door, I am much indebted for kindness. I leave Harrisburg in the morning for York.

Yours for God and Humanity.

M. R. Delany.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.