African Colonization—The Other Side.

Mr. Editor:—On the 6th March, 1850, Daniel Webster offered to go in for the appropriation of Government Millions to remove the free blacks to Africa. Since then, 'follow master Greeley,' of the Tribune, has poured an incessant and ruffian volume of abuse upon the colored Americans, because they do not pick up traps and carry out the will of the Expounder as rapidly

'As lightning does the will of God.'

Mr. Greeley has scented out every event that could be tortured into a Colonization argument, and with a flourish of whip that would do credit to a negro driver, has laid it on without stint, reason, or mercy. To crown all, the other day he 'wanted to know' if we meant to fight.

On my sending him a calmly worded request to have privilege of reply, through his columns, he backed out in worse temper than Mr. Dewey did, and calls for a 'sane African,' and 'well bred' at that, to explain the Indiana vote. I trust Governor Roberts will take pity and send him one by the next Liberia Packet.

The enclosed letter, intended for the Tribune is hardly worth insertion in your columns, and it can add naught to the settled convictions of your readers.

Respectfully yours,

J. McC. S.Smith, James McCune

James McCune Smith (1813–65), a prominent black physician, abolitionist, and writer, was born in New York City to an enslaved father and a self-emancipated mother. He attended the New York African Free School, but was denied admission to Columbia University, Geneva Medical College, and the New York Academy of Medicine. He turned to the University of Glasgow in Scotland, where he received a B.A. (1835), M.A. (1836), and M.D. (1837). Upon returning to New York, he opened a pharmacy and medical practice that catered to both blacks and whites. He became involved in the abolitionist movement, serving as an associate editor of the Colored American in 1839, contributed regularly to the Anglo-African Magazine, and wrote correspondence for the North Star and Frederick Douglass’ Paper under the pseudonym “Communipaw.” Smith also wrote the introduction to Douglass’s second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855). In 1861, Smith helped finance the revival of the Weekly Anglo-African to oppose black colonization and emigration, and he was a prominent member of the New York City Young Men’s Association, the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, and the New York African Society for Mutual Relief. He was the sole attending physician of the Society for the Promotion of Education Among Colored Children, a member and vestryman of St. Philip’s Episcopal Church, and a trustee of the New York Society for the Promotion of Education Among Colored Children. In 1863 Wilberforce College appointed Smith professor of anthropology, but illness kept him from assuming his post. Lib., 1 June 1838; FDP, 18 May 1855; Douglass Papers, ser. 2:7–19; Miller, Search for a Black Nationality, 243; Pease and Pease, They Who Would Be Free, 90–92, 103, 110; Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 115, 134; Rhoda G. Freeman, “The Free Negro in New York City in the Era before the Civil War” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1966), 40–42, 177, 186, 195, 200, 247, 276, 286, 325, 353, 393; DAB, 27:288–89.

August 23d, 1851.