New York, May 12, 1849.
Dear Sirー
As your exchanges will contain a full report of the speeches and resolutions of the various meetings during anniversary week, there can be no necessity for my attempted detail thereof, though some of the [ ] by them narrated may prove interesting to the North Star readers. There could hardly have been a more unpropitious [ ] than Tuesday the 8th inst. and yet Broadway Tebernacle was filled with a highly respectable audience at the opening meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society. The introductory remarks of Mr. Garrison (president)Garrison, 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. and speeches of Parker Pillsbury, Wendell Phillips and Frederick Douglass, were listed to and applauded in a most gratifying manner. The subsequent meetins at the Minerva rooms were characterised by all that earnestness of matter and manner, and freedom of debate so peculiarly a feature of the Society, an exception (as the latter is,) to all the organizations. The delegations from various sections of the country, imparted and received encouragement, to persevere in their mission of redeeming the land from Slavery's curse. Some individuals not before identified with the cause, came forward to participate in the discussion of the most ultra plans, and the natural impressions thus made were of a most hopeful character. One evening session was held at Hope Chapel, up Broadway in a neighborhood of the aristocracy, who were represented in good numbers at the meeting. Mr Garrison submitted a history of the anti-slavery enterprize from its dark hour to the present ー the magnitude of the crime of Slavery, and his determination (God helping him) to abide at his post while life lasts. Frederick Douglass rivetted close attention by his experience as an American Slave, and only worked up opposition when he alluded to Zachary Taylor's Slavery career. Henry Clay's Colonization scheme, and the proposition of sending Bibles to the slaves. No one however volunteered any defence of the would-[ ] the [ ] President, but a young Theologian mounted the rostrum in behalf of the American Church and the plan of supplying the victims of slavery with the Bible, stating that while south, he had been permitted to visit slave quarters, and furnish Bible instruction. It was remarked, however, by Mr. Phillips, and not denied by the speaker, that he must have passed inspection in the slaveholder's parlor. The principal objection urged at this and other meetings, was the impracticality of the scheme, and the absurdity of not first securing to the slave possession of himselfーthat the Bible and all else may then safely be added.
Charles Lenox Remond, during a train of eloquent remarks alluded to his having voted at the recent election for Stephen C. Phillips as Governor of Massachusetts, (all other names on the Free Soil ticket having been erased by him,) his vote under the circumstances was intended as a grateful expression for the successful efforts put forth by him (Mr. Phillips) in Salem for the equal educational privileges of colored children.
The Vigilance Committee meeting at Shiloh church was numerously attended, the addresses were impressive, and a large collection was obtained for legitimate underground-railway purposes.
Several meetings have been held under the auspices of the colored citizens, the result of which it is fondly hoped may unite them in a general effort to aid the anti-slavery cause; though in combating our common enemy, Slavery, the active and influential at times differ very materially in their modus operandi, as is sometimes too evident when Henry Bibb, Charles Lenox Remond, Henry H. Garnet, Samuel R. Ward and Frederick Douglass meet in the arena of debate.
On Friday afternoon and evening, Samuel R. Ward and Frederick Douglass debated in the Minerva rooms the "Constitutionality of American Slavery." They were greeted by an audience comprising much of the intelligent, refined and reformatory, both white and colored. Teh disputants have won for themselves and their respective positions numerous encomiums. The power of logic and rhetoric, blending with genuine wit, "Greek meeting Greek" preserved interest to a late hour, and even then the audience like Oliver Twist, asked for more "of what was really a mental feast." By mutual consent the question was not submitted to vote, and I forbear at present, any elaborate notice of the argument pro and con. The whole was regarded as a briliiant finale to "Anniversary week" in New York.
W. C. N.Nell, William Cooper

William Cooper Nell (1816–74), a black Garrisonian abolitionist, was one of the original editors of the North Star. A graduate of Boston’s segregated Smith School, Nell studied law but never practiced because he refused, on Wendell Phillips’s advice, to take an oath to support the U.S. Constitution. During the early 1840s he worked for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society and the Liberator. From 1847 to 1851 he assisted Douglass on the North Star and served as acting editor when Douglass was absent on speaking tours. Nell remained a Garrisonian loyalist and severed his ties with the North Star when Douglass shifted his allegiance to the Liberty party. At meetings of the Colored National Convention and its council in the 1850s, Nell, an opponent of racially exclusive organizations, attacked Douglass’s plans for a black manual-labor college on the grounds that it would hinder, not help, the movement for racial equality. After Nell advised Boston blacks not to subscribe to Douglass’s newspaper, Douglass branded his former associate a “hanger on” and “contemptible tool” of Garrison. In addition to his abolitionist activities, Nell wrote important histories of African Americans. His Services of Colored Americans in the Wars of 1776 and 1812 (1851) and The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (1855) detailed the contributions of black people to the nation’s founding. In 1858 Nell staged the first Crispus Attucks celebration. During Lincoln’s administration he was appointed a clerk in the Boston post office. NS, 16 February 1849; FDP, 12, 19 August, 9 December 1853, 28 February, 31 March 1854, 12 January 1856; San Francisco Elevator, 27 June 1874; Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 111–12; Pease and Pease, They Who Would Be Free, 86, 245, 254; Robert P. Smith, “William Cooper Nell: Crusading Black Abolitionist,” JNH, 55:182–99 (July 1970); ACAB, 4:489; NCAB, 14:306; DAB, 13:413.