From Our Brooklyn Correspondent.

The departure of Kossuth from this place has left very little for the local newspaper scriblers. The presence of imported Italian Artistes, the usual compliment of French dancers and ballet girls, even Lola Montes herself, cannot fill the vacuum occasioned by it. Nor will the hourly arrivals from abroad, so promptly announced from the throats of the news boys, atone for it.

It is not yet settled whether the great Magyar shall or not make for these United States the next President. Things look that way at present, and politicians all are astride, the topmost rail, intently watching the effects of his movements, at the same time awaiting the people's decision of the matter. Every effort is made by the wire-pullers, and every subterfuge resorted to, to cripple him. The last is, that he has indirectly started an abolition paper here. In the colored circles there is little stirring worthy of much note. The Douglass fund and the Kossuth fund drag their slow length along. The Committee of thirteen, with their accustomed vigilance and zeal, are making extensive preparations for an Anti-Colonization meeting to be held in Zions Church, New York city, I think, some time in the ensuing week. Sad necessity this. It would have been far better to raise the condition of the people above these extremities. I am more and more convinced with every day's development that the whole sum of our difficulties grows out of our poor condition, and I am equally convinced of the necessity of a monied class among us here, who, feeling their true position, would stoutly maintain their ground. The effect would be to give fixity and stability to our people; and so far from some of the best minds amongst us running into such mad schemes, such visionary plans as African Colonization, which tend but to curse them, they would scorn the very idea. They would learn from a series of very different circumstances surrounding them, the difference between emigration and colonization. If they found it to their interest often (which would be probable) to become the emigrant, they reject with indignation the accursed propositions of the colonizer; rather they would not as now be forced upon them for their rejection. The presence of such a class to urge, assist and otherwise encourage, would cause the really ambitious to step out from among the masses continually and climb up to it. Our young men would not as now feel satisfied with fine clothes and some place wherein merely to work from day to day without looking beyond, nor would they feel satisfied with growing fat and portly with good living from the lower tables of their white superiors, for such they are so long as they sustain their relative positions. A higher standard would be before them, to which they would strive to attain. They would be compelled to level up; now the process is leveling down. The man amongst us who has the most means, or whose condition here is the most thriving, is the least regarded. A lurking suspicion that he would dictate, causes the look of defiance, the hiss of contempt and the laugh of derision to meet him at every turn. Thus jaded and worried, he is compelled finally to retreat within the shadow of his own private concerns.

The masses, on the one hand, thus reject the entire benefit of his advice, counsel and assistance, while he on the other shuts off that natural flow of sympathy, otherwise his to

extend, and so important to them to receive. Thus a man here, doing a business of forty thousand dollars a year, is scarcely known to the colored public, unless, perchance, he has something else to recommend him; indeed, it is the poorest passport possible to what is termed good society here. I have in my mind's eye, at this very moment, two or three old and respectably conducted houses of colored men—men whose long standing and high position render their opinions upon any one given subject concerning our welfare, of more worth than all the blather dash set afloat here by the would-be wise leaders since memory; and yet I venture to say they are scarcely known beyond their own immediate circle, certainly not to the colored public.—Who, then, are the guides of the people? I believe but few of these or similar men. Who ought to be? Certainly, those whose capacities and energies have led them beyond the pale of mere speculative theories to palpable and practical results. The deduction is clear, then, that such a class is essential; that it is as much to the interest of our people to sustain it as to the class sustained. Had half of the money expended to show merely the state of slavery and oppression been laid out in the production of such a class, I verily believe ten fold more would have been accomplished in half of the time, both for the slaves and the people here. As matters now stand, our condition does infinitely more to further oppress the slave, than all the barriers possible to conceive of, thrown in our way by reason of slavery. As our space will not permit a further pursuit of this subject, we shall leave it for some further time. So Brother Jonathan seems to have taken the alarm at last, at the discovery that America after all is not his home. That his species when unaided does not propogate here.—That already, despite the rapid influx of foreigners, his cheek bones begin to stick out, and his skin becoming tawny, and his hair coarse and black. The astute and learned JAMES McCUNE SMITH, M. D., of New York, it was, I think, who first made the fact known. The other day a foreign writer of considerable note in Frazier's Magazine ventured upon the same subject, stating, amongst other things, that when the tide of foreign emigration ceased, there would be no more salvation for the poor white American. That he would become for a season stationary, then retrograde and finally dwindle out of his identity. At this, one of the leading American journals has gone into spasms, beyond, I fear, the hope of recovery. We await, however, the efficacy of another week's bracing atmosphere. Regard as we may the views set forth in Frazier's Magazines, one thing is certain, that the tide of emigration must some day cease to flow this way. It is also true, and must be apparent to the most indifferent observer, that even now, is the remoter towns where the foreign-

er's foot does not penetrate, the flaxen hair, blue eyes and florid complexion have entirely disappeared, and the high cheek bones, coarse, black hair and tawny skin have taken entire possession. It is almost the North American Indian who strides up before you.

I see by the message that Gov. Hunt goes it strong for African Colonization. Let me tell him and his coadjutors, that the thin veil of pretended philanthropy that they are attempting to stretch before this subject, is already rent in a thousand pieces, and that the mask of hypocrisy so far sticks out from behind in its bare, naked ugliness, that it were far better to leave it there to the gaze of the world, than to tear it off. Colonize the blacks for humanity's sake!!! Colonize them that we may save them!!! Colonize these poor, miserable wretches—these down-trodden and outcast beings, that they may civlise and christianize one hundred and fifty millions of poor, dark, benighted scarcely human beings, pouring in upon them such a flood of light and truth as the world never saw before!!!

Let me tell Gov. Hunt and his coadjutors to go first and put a correct impress upon the statistical page of their country, and then go and read aright the volume of the future and find there, if they can if it be possible, ever to rid them of this black element for which they seem to have so much solicitude. Let me tell them that if it were even ever possible, by any means whatever, to push this aforesaid black element out of these United States, or if of itself it should drift out, it will but settle about its borders. In a word, so deep has sunken within them, and so abiding is all they have seen and heard, and received, and felt that if indemnity may not be had for all the dismal past, they (the blacks) desire at least to perpetuate its remebrance, not in foreign climes, not in foreign graves, but in future living hearts, within sight of the very spot of its origin.

And yet if the colored people would redeem themselves from the charge of inferiority they must do something, and that instantly. The time for action has come.—One or two years of vigorous effort on their parts would blow his whole vile scheme of African Colonization to the four winds of heaven.

More anon,

ETHIOPWilson, William Joseph ("Ethiop")

William Joseph Wilson (1818–?), a free black man from New Jersey, operated a bootmaking shop in New York City as early as the 1830s. In the 1840s he became a secondary school teacher and later a principal of a black school in Brooklyn. He was an activist on behalf of black education, encouraging access and attendance, and even opened his own library. Wilson also campaigned to secure the franchise for New York African Americans. He served as a member of the Committee of Thirteen, organized by New York black leaders to stop enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act. In the early 1850s Wilson’s letters appeared frequently in Frederick Douglass’ Paper, and Douglass referred to him as the newspaper’s “Brooklyn correspondent.” Wilson’s letters to the newspaper, published under the pseudonym “Ethiop,” were often part of an ongoing debate about the condition of blacks in New York and the United States. Wilson’s most frequent sparring partner in the war of letters was “Communipaw,” actually James McCune Smith, a prominent black physician in New York City. Carleton Mabee, Black Education in New York State: From Colonial to Modern Times (Syracuse, N.Y., 1979), 54, 63-67, 123, 129, 155, 158; Foner and Walker, Black State Conventions, 1:79-88; Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 87, 212, 229; Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, 4:144-45n. .

Brooklyn Heights, Jan. 10th, 1852.