Mowbray Cottage

Jany 23, 77

My dear Friend,

You have been in Washington several time unexpectedy to me this Fall & Winter, & I missed sending a line. Now I will try and have a word or two of friendly greeting awaiting your arrival. I am wondering if you are in the West for extended travel, or you will soon be through with lecturing for this season. It was too bad, too bad, that you have to sit in the cars thro' that dreary day & night, Did you have any food? I fear you had to endure hunger and thirst as well as the tedious waiting & disappointment about missing your lectures. I would

gladly have been on that train, to have helped you to pass the weary time. I am sorry, sorry that you are having such a bothersome time, so much travel and expense, & so little coming in. It was too tantalizing, that mere glimpse of you. There was so much I wanted to hear, and no chance, still it was worth my journey, and during the time we had to listen to that inspirational spiritualism. I took a daguerreotype of you, finer than any I have. I prize it much. Have you read Swinburne's attack on CarlyleCarlyle, Thomas (1795-1881)

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), Scottish historian and social philosopher, was one of the most prolific writers of the Victorian era. He is best remembered for his critically acclaimed multivolume examinations of important historical events and figures, including The French Revolution (1837), Chartism (1840), and a six-volume History of Friedrich II of Prussia, Called Frederick the Great (1858-65). Carlyle lectured widely and wrote on such subjects as Chartism, Darwinism, and economics. On social and scientific issues Carlyle was often acerbic and argumentative, but his works of history marked a groundbreaking advance in the scholarship of the nineteenth century. Fred Kaplan, Thomas Carlyle: A Biography (Ithaca, N.Y. 1983), 239-40; Stanley J. Kunitz, ed., British Authors of the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1936), 115-18. , very severe; but Carlyle deserves it, for don't you think that he has always had so much unhealthy morbid sentiment about him. We are reading Raymond's life of Lincoln, it brings up so vividly the war time, and is care & anxieties,—and if possible we realize more than before the simple greatness of our noble President & you were privileged with a personal knowledge of him. The day I sent that Fork to you. I was taken with a sore throat, & was quite sick, so that I did not go out for 3 weeks. I intended to write but could not manage it, you must have thought it strange that I did not. I would not send you a Knife, because Knives are used to sever, but a fork is used to gather up, and hold together; so I thought one would do as a trifle to commemorate the 21 years of our friendship. something like this, I had ready to write but could not get it written in time. Mrs. PostPost, Amy Kirby

The Posts, Isaac (1798-1872) and Amy Kirby (1802-89), were prominent abolitionists who spent their most active years in Rochester, New York. Isaac was born on Long Island but moved to Scipio, New York, in 1823 with his first wife Hannah Kirby. After Hannah's death in 1827, he married her younger sister, Amy, a native of Jericho, New York. In 1836 the Posts moved to Rochester, where they became involved with Garrisonian abolitionism. The Posts often hid fugitive slaves, and Amy acted as vice president of the American Anti-Slavery Society in the 1850s and 1860s. In addition to abolitionism, Amy was active in the women's movement, including the seminal 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, a meeting that she helped to organize. In 1848 the Posts also numbered among the first converts to spiritualism in Rochester, and Isaac soon attracted fame as a writing medium. Douglass first met the couple in 1842 when he stayed at their home during a lecture tour, and their friendship influenced his choice of Rochester as the base for his newspaper, the North Star. Hewitt, Women's Activism and Social Change, 61, 93, 107, 118, 131-34, 142-43, 169; Blake McKelvey, "Civic Medal Awarded Posthumously," RH, 22:10-11 (April 1960); DAB, 15:117. was very kind to me

I like her vey much. And I think she likes me. at least she acted as if she did. Our Mother is very feeble, not sick. Rochester felt so lonely to me. Can you imagine I missed the two dear homes & the loved inmates. The Howlands are settled in rooms in Paris. I want to know when it will be the best time for me to visit Washington. I dont want to be there, when you are away, or when your house is full of Company. please tell me—Frank has been so interested, & hurried on so in Arithemetic, he was sick, so I have had to stop him. if only, he was as robust in body, as he is in mind, t'would be grand Do you think N. is repentant. I am somewhat anxious about dear Rosa'sSprague, Rosetta Douglass

Rosetta Douglass Sprague (1839–1906), the first child of Anna and Frederick Douglass, was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, on 24 June 1839. In her childhood, Rosetta wrote and read letters for her mother, whom she assisted with housework and with piecework for the shoe factories in Lynn, Massachusetts. Her father sent Rosetta to school at age seven in Albany, New York, where she lived with Abigail and Lydia Mott. When the Douglass family moved to Rochester, Rosetta began attending the Seward Seminary, where her presence offended the parents of one of the white students and led to her segregation from the other pupils. Her father, in a fury, removed Rosetta from the school and hired a private tutor for his daughter. Rosetta, along with her three brothers, then led other students in the efforts to desegregate Rochester’s public school system. From 1854 to 1855, Rosetta attended Oberlin College preparatory school, one of the first institutions of higher education to accept African Americans and women. She became a teacher in Philadelphia and Salem, Massachusetts, until her marriage in 1863 to Nathan Sprague, with whom she had seven children. Before her death in 1906, she wrote a memoir of her mother that remains one of the most complete documents of Anna Murray Douglass’s life. Rosetta Douglass Sprague, My Mother as I Recall Her: A Paper Read before the Anna Murray Douglass Union, W.C.T.U., May 10, 1900 (1900; Washington, D.C., 1923); Dorothy Sterling, ed., We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1984), 132–45; Ellen N. Lawson and Marlene Merrill, “The Antebellum ‘Talented Thousandth’: Black College Students at Oberlin before the Civil War,” Journal of Negro Education, 52: 145 (Spring 1983); Miriam DeCosta-Willis, “Smoothing the Tucks in Father’s Linen: The Women of Cedar Hill,” Sage, 4: 30–33 (Fall 1987); Sylvia Lyons Render, “Afro-American Women: The Outstanding and the Obscure,” Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress, 32: 306–10 (October 1975), 307–10. happiness. There's but one thing can secure it. I am hoping to have a line, soon, to tell of your prosperity. I have not written before since the

New Year came in. I surely hope you will have prosperity & joy in 77 to repay you for the sorrow and care of 76. We may wish good wishes, but how really helpless we are, in being able to do anything to really benefit our friends. If only the chance was equal to the wish, & the will, your halls would be strewn with blessings only.

With the Kindest wishes

ever your friend

E. PeirsonPierson (Peirson), Elizabeth

A native of Yorkshire, Elizabeth “Lizzie” Pierson (1826–aft. 1900) was the eldest of ten children born to the English Quakers Thomas and Hannah Smith Pierson. The Piersons left England in 1849, and by 1850 were living in Lockport, New York. Charles Douglass lived with the Pierson family for a period of time after John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, and both Elizabeth and her younger sister Mary Ann seem to have maintained close, lifelong friendships with Frederick Douglass and other members of his family. 1850 U.S. Census, New York, Niagara County, 121; 1870 U.S. Census, New York, Niagara County, 73; 1900 U.S. Census, New York, Niagara County, 163; Fought, Women, 170–71, 179, 241, 270; “England and Wales, Quaker Birth, Marriage, and Death Registers, 1578–1837,” Ancestry.com; “New York, Alien Depositions of Intent to Become U.S. Citizens, 1825–1871,” Ancestry.com.