Mr. Waite J. Lewis and the Smith's Lands.

Frederick Douglass:ーI have this day received a letter, which I copy below, and in justice to all parties concerned, I transmit it to you for publication. It is certainly proper that the whole matter should be placed in a proper light before the public. I know nothing personally detrimental to the character of Mr. Lewis. I am not, nor was I ever, an agent for him, to receive money or otherwise, nothwithstanding such a statement is made in the letter below. I am well acquainted with Mr. James H. Henderson, formerly of Troy, N.Y.; and in all my intercourse with him, I have found him to be a Christian, a cautious man, and of the soundest integrity. He is now prospering well upon the lands given him in Essex county by the good Mr. Smith. If Mr. Lewis is innocent of the charges made against him, I Hope it will be shown. I do not make any charge. If things are not as they are represented by Mr. Lewis and his agents, then have we again been most miserably humbugged, and most shamefully gulled. But one year ago, the people here lost a large amount of money through the agency of a land company in New York; and last week they paid largely to Mr. Lewis' agent. This matter must be seen to. The grantees cannot well afford thus to throw away money.ーCALIFORNIA does not extend to New York. The best "diggers" get but a dollar a day in this region.

H. H. GarnetGarnet, Henry Highland

Born a slave in Kent County, Maryland, Henry Highland Garnet (1815-82) fled north with his parents in 1824. He attended the African Free School in New York City, the Noyes Academy in Canaan, New Hampshire, and the Oneida Institute in Whitesboro, New York. Garnet was one of the founders of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society and a stump speaker for the Liberty party. Licensed to preach by the Presbytery of Troy in 1842, Garnet went to Jamaica in 1852 as a missionary of the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland. An early proponent of black emigration to Africa and founder of the African Civilization Society, Garnet, in his appeal sanctioning slave uprisings before a National Negro Convention in Buffalo, New York, in August 1843, praised the slave rebel Madison Washington. After the Civil War, Garnet was president of Avery College in Pittsburgh and the U.S. minister to Liberia (1881-82). Joel Schor, Henry Highland Garnet: A Voice of Black Radicalism in the Nineteenth Century (Westport, Conn., 1977); Dorothy Sterling, ed., Speak Out in Thunder Tones: Letters and Other Writings by Black Northerners, 1787-1865 (Garden City, N.Y., 1973), 376; Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 68, 185, 216-17, 226-27; ANB, 8:735-36. .

Geneva, February 5, 1849.