Letter from Geo. T. Downing.

Friend Douglass: I have just laid upon my table the letter of advice from James G. Birney, to me and others, to leave this country and go to Africa. In vain have I perused its contents for that hopeful, high soul, self-denying sentiment which, under the Providence of God, is yet to redeem us and our country; which the more convinces me, that if you would find real depth of soul, seek a black man. I read with regret, but not mingled with feeling, until I reached that part which speaks of his counsel being "rejected," where he says "the colored people have fallen into the notion—a notion in which perhaps they have been trained—that it is a point of honor for them to remain in this country as long as their colored brethren are enslaved; and that it will gratify their enemies, the Colonization Society, shou'd they go to Liberia." Forsooth, a "notion" we have "fallen" in—have been "trained" to—indeed. The exceptions given by the Honorable Mr. Birney, the trainer of the trained, who will not "at first" reject his counsel, are those whom he has taken under his especial training, the individuals who have had as he says "rather a dim or obscure view of the plan proposed."

Friend Douglass, I should like that Mr. Birney should understand that if he has succeeded in training a few by a "dim" and "obscure" view of a plan, that it is their duty to go to "Purgatory," that your correspondent, and he is aware of many more like him, who have, after a full, clear and thoughtful consideration of all contained in the plan, resolved to avoid its punishments, that they do not regard this as a very "Hell," though bad, for here there is hope. We do hope. "Have been trained." While LundyLundy, Benjamin

The child of New Jersey Quakers, Benjamin Lundy (1789-1839) was trained in the saddler’s trade. After living for a time in western Virginia, Lundy moved to Ohio, where he joined Charles Osborn in the publication of a pioneering antislavery newspaper, the Philanthropist. In 1821 he began his own paper, the Genius of Universal Emancipation, which he published first in Greenville, Tennessee, then in Baltimore, and finally in Washington, D.C. Lundy’s associate editor while in Baltimore was the young and unknown William Lloyd Garrison. In the early 1830s, Lundy championed black colonization in Texas, which he visited three times. He later supplied valuable eyewitness information about conditions in Texas to congressmen who were battling against its annexation as a Slave state. From 1836 to 1838 he edited the Philadelphia National Enquirer, an organ of the Pennsylvania State Anti-Slavery Society. In the last years of his life, Lundy moved to Illinois and revived publication of the Genius. Merton L. Dillon, Benjamin Lundy and the Struggle for Negro Freedom (Urbana, Ill., 1966); Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism: A History of Newspapers in the United States through 260 Years, 1690 to 1950, rev. ed. (New York, 1950), 206; ACAB, 4:4; NCAB, 2:20; DAB, 11:506-07. and 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. were yet groping in them midst of darkness, seeking light—when Gerrit SmithSmith, Gerrit

Gerrit Smith (1797– 1874), a New York businessman and land speculator, became best known for his philanthropic work for such reform causes as temperance and abolition. Between 1828 and 1835, he donated large sums of money to the American Colonization Society, but abandoned that movement in 1835 when his sympathies shifted to the immediate abolitionists. In the 1840s, he gave approximately 140,000 acres of land in upstate New York to three thousand black settlers, thus qualifying them to vote. Smith was a founder and frequent candidate of the Liberty party, running for governor of New York on that ticket in 1840 and winning a seat in Congress in 1852. When the Free Soil merger with moderate antislavery Democrats and Whigs lured away many Liberty party supporters, Smith helped bankroll that organization until 1860. Smith befriended Douglass when the latter moved to Rochester, and Smith frequently helped finance Frederick Douglass’ Paper. Like Douglass, Smith supported John Brown, but psychological stress caused by the failure at Harpers Ferry brought on the first of a series of bipolar episodes that greatly reduced his subsequent reform activities. Ralph Volney Harlow, Gerrit Smith: Philanthropist and Reformer (1939; New York, 1972); Gerald Sorin, The New York Abolitionists: A Case Study of Political Radicalism (Westport, Conn., 1971), 269– 87; Lewis Perry, Radical Abolitionism: Anarchy and the Government of God in Antislavery Thought (Ithaca, N.Y., 1973), 170– 80; John R. McKivigan and Madeleine Leveille, “The ‘Black Dream’ of Gerrit Smith, New York Abolitionist,” Syracuse University Library Associates Courier, 20:61– 76 (Fall 1985); NCAB , 2:322– 23; DAB, 17:270– 71. , a good man then and now, lacked wisdom—while James G. Birney, yet blind, was a slaveholder, holding his fellow man in unchristian and cruel bondage, the colored man with only that training which a love of home and a high sense of honor and of duty taught, saw the injustice and infamy of slavery and colonization, and proclaimed his fixed and unalterable determination to be the enemy of both, to remain here in the face of all persuasion, inducements, or threats, that the triumphing of a principle, as well as the linked connection between him and the slave, forbade anything else, (vide proceedings of deliberations of colored men in 1829, 30 and 31.) Thus it will be seen that the "trained" party (if there be any) is Garrison, Smith, Birney &c., and our deep and heartfelt grief is that Mr. Birney should be found "kicking in the traces."

It would be rather pitiful to suppose that in the face of principle and interest, that we would refrain from going to Africa, or anywhere else because it would "grafity our enemy." Right and truth will triumph here. God is on our side. He will not desert us. He has made us instruments, humble though we may be, to bring about results and a principle in this country, up to this time, not really and truly felt in the world—Universal Brotherhood.

Mr. Birney has gone to 1492 for an instance where a peaceful and unoffending people, the Jews, were driven from their home. We are christians—there is no chance for Bigotry; this is not 1492; we have all the progress, light and humanity, that has since burst upon the world; an influence that would stifle any such outrage, though it might be attempted to be exercised against a less influential body than we.

The case of the Cherokee Indians—spoken of by Mr. Birney: they were not civilized—they did not assimilate, imitate, desire communion, intercourse; they cherished feelings of hatred and revenge. With us it is just the reverse; our very passiveness, our associate qualities are the shields that have and will protect us. What care I for periodical ebulitions favorable to African Colonization, for Indiana enactments, aye, all akin to them, that had their birth cotemporaneous with the Fugitive Slave Law. They serve good purposes; they arouse conscience; they will urge our people to do something. These injustices, because of which Americans will yet [bleed], will have their day, and die "unwept, unhonored and unsung." The ingredients of which they are composed, will hasten the event—in the face—aye, measurably in consequence of these, there may by observed a steady and healthy progress.

We are improving, but the greatest drawback is, that we are not progressing en masse in a ratio in keeping with the progress favorable to us.

Geo. T. DowningDowning, George T.

George T. Downing (1819-1903) was the eldest son of Thomas Downing, a well-known black restaurateur in New York City. After an education at the city's segregated Mulberry Street School and at Hamilton College, he worked in his father's business until 1855, when he opened a hotel in Newport, Rhode Island. Downing was active in the Underground Railroad and led a successful effort to integrate Rhode Island public schools. He supported Douglass in the public controversy with Henry H. Garnet over the merits of the latter's African Civilization Society. In 1859 Downing presided over a convention of New England blacks that gave a qualified endorsement to the Republican party. During the Civil War, Downing moved to Washington, D.C., and became manager of the House of Representatives' restaurant. In February 1866 Downing was the chairman of a committee of blacks,including Douglass, who attended an interview with President Andrew Johnson during which the chief executive urged his audience to abandon their advocacy of black suffrage. Lib., 20 July 1855; New York Weekly Anglo-African, 19 September 1859, 21 April 1860; NASS, 24 February 1866; Cleveland Gazette, 12 September 1885; New York Times, 22 July 1903; Simmons, Men of Mark, 1003-06; Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 145, 150, 190, 218-19; McPherson, Struggle for Equality, 343-46; Guichard Parris, "George T. Downing," NHB, 5:42 (November 1941); Freeman, "The Free Negro in New York City," 46, 49-56; DANB, 187-88. .

New York, March 19th. [1852]