About Father Mathew.

Frederick Douglass, Dear Sir:ーWe had a glorious meeting yesterday at Worcester. The weather was perfect, and not less than 400 persons came together in Hospital Grove, to commemorate Emancipation in the British West India Islands, and to keep the Fast (none which Zachary TaylorTaylor, Zachary

Prominent Whigs Thurlow Weed, John J. Crittenden, and Alexander H. Stephens promoted Zachary Taylor (1784–1850), a general in the Mexican-American War, as their party’s presidential nominee in the 1848 election. As both a military hero and a slave owner, Taylor appealed to southern states, which supported him in his nomination and election to the presidency. Brainerd Dyer, Zachary Taylor (1946; New York, 1967); DAB, 18:349–54; NCAB, 4:367–70. appointed, but) which God has chosen. We had addresses from Charles 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. , Theodore ParkerParker, Theodore

Theodore Parker (1810-60), Harvard-educated Unitarian clergyman and reformer, was among the most erudite of all New England transcendentalists. Born in Lexington, Massachusetts, he taught at Boston-area private schools from 1831 until 1842 and graduated from Harvard Divinity School in 1836. After his ordination in 1837, Parker preached mainly at his West Roxbury church until 1845, when he resigned and accepted the pastorate of the new Twenty- Eighth Congregational Society of Boston. There he attracted a large, socially diverse and racially integrated following. The author of numerous tracts, sermons, and published addresses, he also edited the Massachusetts Quarterly Review throughout its three-year existence. Although he criticized some Garrisonian positions, Parker joined in the antislavery cause after 1845, attacking slavery on moral and economic grounds but basing his most militant abolitionism on the belief that black emancipation would prepare the way for further Anglo-Saxon dominance. As a member of the Boston Vigilance Committee he gave frequent aid to escaped bondsmen, actively resisted the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, and was indicted for his role in the Anthony Burns case. An outspoken proponent of the admission of Kansas as a free state, Parker hosted a meeting in 1858 at which John Brown disclosed his plans for a raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Parker was among the "Secret Six" who supported John Brown's raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859. Suffering from declining health, Parker traveled to the Caribbean and then Europe, where he hoped to improve his condition. Instead he died of tuberculosis in Florence, Italy, on 10 May 1860, where he was buried. Renehan, Secret Six, 37-46; Henry Steele Commager, Theodore Parker (Boston, 1960); C. Peter Ripley, ed., The Black Abolitionist Papers, 5 vols. (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1985- 92), 4:52; Fredrickson, Black Image in the White Mind, 119-21, 157-58; ACAB, 4:654-56; DAB, 14:38-41; ANB, 17:43-44. , Adin BallouBallou, Adin

, Wendell PhillipsPhillips, Wendell

Boston-born and Harvard-educated Wendell Phillips (1811-84) ranked second only to Garrison in influence in the American Anti-Slavery Society in the 1840s and 1850s. Bored with the legal profession and influenced by his antislavery fiancee, Ann Terry Greene, Phillips dedicated himself to abolitionism beginning in 1837. A highly gifted orator, Phillips was in demand as a lecturer even in nonabolitionist circles. Besides abolition, Phillips championed woman suffrage, prohibition, penal reform, Indian rights, and legislative protection for workers. When Garrison retired from the presidency of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1865, Phillips assumed the post and led abolitionists until passage of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870. James Brewer Stewart, Wendell Phillips: Liberty's Hero (Baton Rouge, La., 1986); Irving H. Bartlett, Wendell Phillips: Brahmin Radical (Boston, 1961); DAB, 14:546-47. , Wm. L. 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. , and others; and the time did not suffice to hear all whom we should have rejoiced to hear. We had excellent Anti-Slavery singing; and notwithstanding the crowd, the great warmth of the day, and the insufficiency of seats, the audience were in the best possible spirits, and seemed to enjoy in the highest manner the various events of the day. I am sorry to tell you that Father Mathew seems to be about to ignore all his Antislavery, and to fall into the wake of other British clergymen who have visited this country. You will remember that he signed the Irish Address several years since, in company with Daniel O'Connell, and 70,000 others, calling upon Irishmen in America to stand forth the open opponents of Slavery, &c., &c. Father Mathew was accordingly invited to attend our Celebration at Worcester, as one who it was naturally supposed would be glad to take part in an occasion which celebrated the justice and magnanimity of the British people. But he gave no answer to the invitation; and, only in a brief conversation with the two gentlemen who bore the letter to him, expressed his determination to have nothing to say upon the subject of slavery while in this country. These facts were give at Worcester; and many were there who cried shame to him! You will not wonder to hear that Father M. has been invited to be the guest, at the White House, of President Zachary Taylor; nor that he is about to make a tour through the Slave State.

I am, in haste, Yours,

Lecester, Aug. 4, 1849.

Samuel May, Jr.May, Samuel, Jr.