Hebron, N.Y., Dec. 9, 1848

Dear Brother Douglass:ーThough personally unknown to you, I take the liberty of sending you a line, requesting of you a favor. As an Agent of the Baptist Free Mission Society, I am endeavoring to call the attention of Baptists to the Cherokee slaveholding Baptist churches.

I remember hearing brother Henry Bibb make some remarks in his lecture in the great anti-slavery meeting in Chicago, some two or three years since, respecting the slaveholding professors in that nation. Will you please inform him of my desire to obtain any facts in his possession or knowledge in regard to the Baptist Churches in the Cherokee countryーthe number of slaveholders in those churchesーthe number of slaves heldーpreaching to missionaries in regard to this question, and whatever else may throw light upon the matter. I am yours for Christ's suffering members.

Edward MathewsMathews, Edward

Edward Mathews (1812–73) was an Englishman, born in Oxford, who came to the United States around 1830, where he attended Hamilton College, which later became Colgate University, in New York. He began working for the American Baptist Free Mission Society, travelling west to Wisconsin and Kentucky, preaching antislavery and temperance. Mathews returned to England in about 1852 where he continued his message on behalf of the society. In 1866, he composed his autobiography where he recounts many of his antislavery lecturing stories. It is said that Matthews inspired Harriet Beecher Stowe’s character, Father Dickson, in Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. Troy (N.Y.) Weekly Times, 30 May 1857; Portland (Me.) Daily Press, 20 January 1868; Edward Mathews, The Autobiography of the Rev. E. Mathews (Bristol, Eng., 1866), 26–27; Fourth Annual Meeting of the American Baptist Free Mission Society, (Utica, NY: H. H. Curtis, 1847), 10; A General Catalogue of Colgate University, (Hamilton, N.Y., 1913), 29; The First Half Century of Madison University (New York, 1872), 242–43; William J. Richardson, “The Life and Times of Samuel H. Davis: An Anti-Slavery Activist,” Afro-Americans in New York Life and History, 33:1 (December 2008). .