For Frederick Douglass Paper

FROM OUR NEW YORK CORRESPONDENT

Mr Editor:

1.—George Bancroft. (as well as Phylbel and I.) "drop in" at Bailliere's, occasionally. I wonder how he found the place: is there an instinct, which leads anglers for ideas to snake out, or snoop out the pools richest in thought material, where golden ideas flash thick and fast? So thought I, in poring over Mr. Bancroft's Historical Oration. Before I had finished the fourth paragraph, I clapped my hands, and shouted, as Byron did, when he detected in Ivanhoe, fourteen gems culled from Shakespeare, within a few pages: Banroft has been at Bailliere's and bought "of the plurality of Worlds!"—a book by an unknown writer, supposed to be Prof. Whowoll. It is this book which has furnished the golden warp which binds together the argument and nestles the gems which blaze through that oration.

And yet, I don't thank Mr. Bancroft for his oration, great though it be: he has not only "stolen thunder," slowly maturing for your columns, Mr. Editor, but he has led me to look at the Book, very much as we will look on a great poem travestied: and on his oration as we regard the Elgin marbles: some ideas from "the Plurality of Worlds" fit so oddly in the oration, and others remind one of tThe infinitely grander argument of which they are the pilfered fragments. In early summer time I read "More Worlds than One," by Sir David Brewster; and felt satisfied that he had not answered all the arguments of the writer on "the Plurality of Worlds," of which his book is a review: when mid-summer came, and its bereavements, I procured the latter book, as relating to that future state which my darlings, not lost, but gone before, has reached. And in that time shoreless woe, this book afforded much of the needed light to remove the eclipse of faith under which I stumbled.

Dec. 8.—Phylbel and I have both been "spilled." He in Providence on Tuesday, and I and my waggon boy in Gotham on Wednesday. "How did you feel Fyl," said I, as he limped through Church Street, this morning. "By Jupiter," said he, "I was knocked senseless, and saw more stars than Herschell ever did!" For my part I saw no stars, but only Charley 's heels as they seemed each moment coming, but did not come quite close enough to rend the veil which is growing thinner and thinner: weary me, I have not been able to stir this icy heart to thanksgiving that those steel shod hoofs did not come nearer!

But I sat down to write a little gossip--
The Queen of Heaven has removed to that inchoate city which will soon be Brooklyn;

Where her husband, Jupiter, keeps a "restaurant" for the uses of those who people the neighboring Olympus (City Hall.) Mr. Editor, your readers know that I am not given to scandal, and have never written a word which could offend the most refined and delicate ear—your readers know (at least some of them do) that for many years I have been an attendant on that most worthy, and respectable, however in-former times-abused, St. Phillip's Church: where the Lita y forfends us against—"and all charitableness:" your readers will understand, therefore, with what grievous reluctance I announce that certain members of St. Phillips's, and divers Elders of Siloam, listening to the syren voice of Juno aforesaid, and urged moreover by teh world, the flesh and the—ahem! did array themselves in unseemly garments and jackboots, and, after the manner of mimers, mummers and playfaiers--did set a play! Do not, for a moment, imaging that 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. was there, Mr. Editor; you know how stud, and chaste, and Presbyterianly constructed his mind is; and you know—from his Bridgeport letter—how emphatically opposed he is, to the doings of the whites.
--I am told, Mr. Editor----The Ethiop was there, as a for That this Elder in Siloam did

Dance all night, till broad day light
And go home with Mrs. E in the morning!

After all the trouble I have taken with him, to bring him out, to show his points—to ennoble and purify his style of thought and writing, to trumpet his fame, to trot him out, to show his points—that he should come to this! the theme is too painful and I desist but must add, that unless he sends me that big pear, which he promised me from taylor's window, I will tell your readers how he carried a challenge from the distinguished clothier to the eminent physician of his village.
W. W. CHAPMAN is respectfully informed that when the 10,000 Liberty vote in this State dwindled down to about fifty in a very few years, it seemed to me that someone had cut the guy, and spilled the contents of
the quarter boat: and when I see the Old Organization at Boston and New York exhibiting or trying to exhibit on their platform of Lecture Sam. Huston, the slaveholder, and Anson Burlinghame, elect of the Know Nothing pro-slavery organization-while they exclude from said platform of Lectures Fredrick Douglass, James W. C. Pennington John I. Gains and John Mercer Langston because they are colored men--for this is the only difference between these latter and those former, except the latter may be of higher intellect--it appears a sufficient reason for me to say that there is no room for black men on the Old Organization platform First because we are asked and secondly because we cannot strike hands with slave holders nor with those who do strike hands with slave holders and their abettors

Slavery truth spread before the people, at prices which the people can afford: the Lecture Committee troubled with the itchy palm, seems bent on making money out of the so-called Course of Anti-Slavery Lectures in the city: the spread of truth being quite a secondary letter: last year, ladies procured single tickets for the course for one dollar: this year only double tickets can be procurred at three dollars: and, it is laid down as a violation of anti-slavery to cut a ticket in two and admit a thirsty but poor soul to feed on the crumbs falling from the table of the A. S. host.

My mother, dear lady, tells a story which happened in her home, Charleston, S. C.—A Guinea-man who had risen from slavery to freedom, and the ownership of a horse and had his horse ran away one day: away followed the the Guinea-man, shouting through the streets, "Toppy dat horse! toppy dat horse! White man stop him I gib him TEN dollar! Black man top him I gib him FIVE dollar! toppy dat horse! toppy dat horse!"

It is whispered hereabouts, that Oliver regards this as sound Anti-Slavery doctrine—gives his white lecturers in proportion ten, and his block (lecturer per winter) five dollars for stopping "dat horse." Brother Remond can correct me if I am wrong.

Yours affectionately.
COMMUNIPAWSmith, 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. .