Frederick Douglass, Esq.—
Dear Sir:—
You have seen the address of the colored people of New York city to Kossuth. What a stupendously foolish thing. Not a word of their own wrongs - their sufferings - their enslavement: - no point, no directness, no nothing except the mere rhetoric. Palaver, the whole of it; and to cap the climax of absurdities, the address winds up with the assurance to the Hungarian that on the day of giving they (the colored people) will be on hand with at least the "widow's mite," if no more. Where did mortal man ever read of such folly as this before? Just as though, if the colored people are to invest money for the benefit of the oppressed, justice, consistency, and the commonest self-respect, do not require that such money should be expended in some way for the benefit of the four millions in our own land who are ground to the dust in chains and slavery, and the tens of thousands of others who, by cruel laws and customs are kept in poverty and degradation.
The men who wrote that address are not fools. No equal number of men in the union can present a greater amount of native intellect and talent; and in education and accomplishments some of the members of that committee are by no means inferior to the most favored of their oppressors. How much the mere guilty then are they? I cannot let them go gently by. Though no other colored man should speak out, I, for one, will do so; and let it be known that their is at least one of the oppressed in America, whose feelings that address, lacking as it does, so much of vitality, does not represent, and who can find next to nothing to applaud in so ridiculous a performance.
The address, milk and water as it was, failed to make any impression upon Kossuth; and, as a matter of course, he treated those who presented it with the most withering contempt. "Gentlemen, the time for addresses is past, and the time for action has come." If that isn't "summary," I should like to know what is? Poor men, how they must have felt as they sneaked away from his presence.
Kossuth is a man of matchless power of mind. He sets aside all orators, whether of ancient or modern date. He is positively an intellectual wonder. Nevertheless, he has proved himself not only mortal man, but capable of cherishing views and feelings which are not in accordance with the laws that lie at the basis of our common humanity, and which bind us together in one bond of general brotherhood.
Kossuth is not asked to turn anti-slavery lecturer, though this is what Wright of the Commonwealth charges upon Wm. Lloyd 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. . He is not asked to turn aside from the Hungarian cause, or to divide his energies between the cause of the American slave, and that of the Hungarian oppressed. Nobody but a fool would ask that. He is simply asked to do nothing or say nothing while here, which would imply that he regarded the liberty

of the American black man as less sacred than that of the Hungarian white man: in other words, he is simply asked to see that there does exist among us such an institution as American Slavery, and to utter to the Americans, face to face, one burning rebuke by way of its condemnation. Do less that this, he could not, and maintain his integrity; and doing less than this, it is my prayer at least, that such "Apostles of liberty" as he, may be fewer than ever were angel's visits, and a great deal farther between.
"My principle," says Kossuth, in his card, "in this respect is, that every nation has the sovereign right to dispose of its own domestic affairs, without any foreign interference; that I therefore shall not meddle with any domestic concerns of the United States." Four millions of Africans and their descendants therefore may toil on in a worse slavery than ever the Hungarian knew; and, for all Kossuth cares, the devil catch them at last. This is benevolence, surely! Why comes he here to induce us to meddle with the "domestic concerns" of Australia? If the enslavement of the blacks to the whites in this country be a "domestic concern," then the oppressed condition of the Hungarians to the Australians is a "domestic concern." And if, being a "domestic concern," the enslavement of the one class be outside of his notice, then why, with equal justice, should not the oppressed condition of the other class, being a "domestic concern," be outside of our notice? O, consistency, thou art a jewel!—and besides, I hate hypocrisy.
The plain truth is, Kossuth's disclaimer will get him more money, but be it known unto him, that money gotten thus will curse him, and not bless him.
Some men I know at this point read us lectures on "Common Sense." Let them read on. I acknowledge no common sense which is in contravention of the law of rectitude.
Much better would it have been for the cause of freedom the world over had Kossuth maintained his integrity. One word from him to this people would have startled this nation into a sense of propriety never felt before; and would have given such an impetus to the cause of freedom as would almost have enabled us to fix the very day when the good time should come. What retards the cause of republican freedom in Europe more than our abominable inconsistencies? Do not tyrants take courage at our position, and

laugh us to very scorn? Were we at one with our professions, democracy could not lag in Europe. It would come quickly; and not only so, but be a fact, fixed, firm, immovable.
No good comes of the spirit of compromise, and compromising with right and duty. He who cannot read that fact in this country's history, is quite too stupid to be endured. Do not wise men begin to fear that unless we do something for slavery, soon slavery will do something for us? And is this fear ill-founded? Are they foolish who fear that slavery in destroying itself may destroy the nation, and that in a way the equal of which has never yet been written upon any page of human history? But I forbear to say more. May God help the weak, and give wisdom and power to those who are laboring to bring slavery and oppression to the dust, not only in Austria or Hungary, but wherever they may be found.
Faithfully yours,
Wm. G. Allen.Allen, William G.

Son of a free black mother and a white immigrant father, William G. Allen (1820–?) grew up in southeastern Virginia. After graduating from the Oneida Institute in New York, Allen taught school in Canada and New York. Allen was a popular lecturer and was regarded as an expert on black history and literature. In 1844, while teaching in Troy, New York, he assisted Henry Highland Garnet in editing the National Watchman, a temperance and abolitionist newspaper aimed at black readers. Shortly after having its title changed to the Clarion, the short-lived paper failed in 1847. No issues are known to have survived. In 1850 Allen became a professor of rhetoric and belles-lettres at New York Central College in McGrawville, New York, where he caused a public furor by marrying one of his white female students in 1852. The following year the Allens sailed to Great Britain, where William lectured for the abolitionist cause, and both he and his wife operated a series of small schools. Hutton, Early Black Press in America, 9; R. J. M. Blackett, “William G. Allen: The Forgotten Professor,” CWH, 26:39–52 (March 1980); Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, 4:135–36n; ANB, 1:346–47.
McGrawville, N.Y., Dec. 30, 1851