Frederick Douglass:
Dear Sir:—
There is now a project on foot to attach a medical department to New York Central College.—A glorious idea this, as, if it should be successful, it will afford an opening for study to the very many colored young men who are now, by prejudice and scorn, shut out of most, if not all, of the medical colleges in the land. The faculty are physicians of Syracuse, in high standing and repute.
Geo. W. Clarke, Esq., of Rochester, delivered a lecture in the Presbyterian Church, on Temperance, last Sabbath evening; and on Tuesday evening following, gave a concert in the College Chapel. Mr. Clarke's lecture was instructive, highly so; and had it not been quite so long, would have made a most decided impression. His concert, I regret to say, was but thinly attended. Those who did not hear him, know not what enjoyment they might have had. It was a treat, surely, such as one seldom gets in these parts. Mr. Clarke has a magnificent voice, and in some of its tones, sweet to the ravishing of the inner soul. His music was also well selected. "A man's a man for a that," was given with great effect. I could almost wish that our friend would give himself up entirely to music so harmoniously does he blend humanity with art. The principles of truth, justice, and as equal brotherhood would find their way much quicker to the human heart when sung in his sweet tones than when delivered as didaction.
On Wednesday evening following, the Luca family favored me with a grand concert.

This family is composed of four brothers—but lads yet, and all of them black enough to satisfy the most cavilling, that for whatever of genius they possess, they are not indebted to one drop of the blood of the "superior" race. The youngest one performs gloriously on the piano; and would utterly confound (could they hear him) all the notions of the little-souled muddy-heads who are overlastingly prating of African inferiority. The concert was a triumph; and I take pleasure in commending the family to all who wish to hear sweet music, and who desire to encourage those who have to make their way upward through obstacles which those of a fairer hue know not of.
Indeed the African race seem of late to be verifying the prediction that they will yet produce singers and instrumental performers such as the world has never yet seen, neither read of nor heard of. Miss Greenfield, by the most pro-slavery and prejudiced, is regarded as inferior to the greatest artistes who have sung upon our shores only in cultivation, while in natural power she is not only their equal, they say, but superior to the whole of them. I see the face of a black woman, but hear the voice of an angel, was the expression of countenance marked upon her audience, says the Springfield Republican, as one of her recent concerts. Two female singers (colored) have recently arisen in Europe, both of them said to possess astonishing power. These are gratifying results, I confess; and they fill my heart with joy. Not by wealth alone, nor by intelligence alone, nor by virtue alone, is the race to be lifted out of degradation and bondage, but by wealth, intelligence, virtue, science and art combined.

I have recently read "Uncle Tom." What a book! It is, in its line, the wonder of wonders. How its descriptions stir the blood, indeed almost make it leap out of the heart! What delineations of character—St. Clare and Legree, extremes of slaveholders. While the latter is a fit representative of the system of the pit, the former shows that not even slaveholding itself can blot out every whit of whatsoever is good in the human heart. Thank God for this little space wherein one vivifying ray may enter!
Uncle Tom was a good old soul, thoroughly and perfectly pious. Indeed if any man had too much piety, Uncle Tom was that man. I confess to more of "total depravity." More shame to me, possibly, but nevertheless such is the fact. My non-resistance is of the Douglass, Parker, and Phillip's school. I believe, as you do, that it is not light the slaveholder wants, but fire, and he ought to have it. I do not advocate revenge, but simply, resistance to tyrants, if it need be, to the death.
The religious conversation between the slave-traders, on the 102d and 3d pages, is a capital thing. Why do you not copy it?—How it tells upon the miserable spittle licking religionists of the present day, who, as Tom Soker has it, are running up a bill all their lives with the devil, calculating to sneak out when pay time comes. Such religion is "prison mean,"—it is "dog meanness."
The story of the Quadroon girl, second book, thirty-fourth chapter, exceeds anything that I have ever read, in all that is soul-searching and thrilling. Indeed, the book is marvellous for its dramatic power, and I do not wonder that cheap editions are now being called for throughout the Northern States.

I have one regret, with regard to the book, and that is, that the chapter favoring colonization was ever written. I do not, however, apprehend so much harm from it, as some others seem to anticipate. Many of the bad features of that chapter, are somewhat modified by the admission, on the 302d page, of the right of the colored people to meet and mingle in this country—to rise by their individual worth, and without distinction of caste or color; and that they have not only the rights of common men here, but more than these, the rights of an injured race for reparation; and still further, that those who deny this right to rise without distinction of caste or color, and in particular to rise here, are false to their own professed principles of human equality.
I have no objection to the christianization of Africa. God speed the missionaries who go thither for so high and holy purpose.—Those, also, be they white or colored, who go to build republics upon her shores, go to perform a work, great, grand, and glorious.—God speed them also. Liberia is a pigmy, and cannot be more. Great men could as soon grow up and flourish in Greenland, as on that part of the Guinea Coast, where those colonists have settled.
As to the talk about African nationality, this is sheer nonsense, if, by African nationality is meant, a nation composed entirely of pure Africans. Nations worthy of the name are only produced by a fusion of races. If Americans had less prejudice, they could read history more clearly. Whence the Romans! The Magyars! The English! The Americans! The latter, at least, notwithstanding they roll up their eyes, and go into pretended fits, at the mere mention of amalgamation,

are, of all the races, the most amalgamated under the sun; and, as a matter of course—the most energetic and powerful. Indeed, fusion of races seems to be a trait, distinctive of Americans. The shades of night scarce gather around them, are they (the Americans seek amalgation with even the very race which they affect most to do despise. Talk of the "instincts of nature"—the hypocrites!
That the bona fide African race has peculiarities, I admit; and I admit, farther, that if these peculiarities are drawn out without intermixture, they will develop a civilization very good indeed; indeed, so good as to be almost good for nothing. the Saxons unmixed with the Romans, the Normans and the Danes were a clever people—no more.—The feeble Asiatics unmixed with the Persians and the Hunns, are not Magyars. And the Jews, who are Jews still, excite next to no interest in the great world of science, literature, and art. The plain truth, is, God has made us of one blood, and thereby, to intermingle. We progress by adhering to this rule, we go backward by its violation. Nations, there must be, but merely as conveniences, not to abrogate the great law of equal brotherhood.
One word more, with regard to the book. It contains some happy bits as prejudice against color. These are timely. Abolitionists, by the hundreds, are not yet rid of this soul-narrowing and heart-belittleing feeling, this "blasphemy against God," and "quarrel with Jehovah." It is so easy to talk, and so comparatively easy to practice within circles set out exceedingly obnoxious to the community, that many delude themselves into the belief that they are at one with the doctrine of an equal brotherhood, and are even christians, when their hearts are polluted with a prejudice

which is, beyond all question, a sin meaner than which none ever rankled in the freeman's heart. Oh, for more good, great men, and more great good men. A friend wrote me, not long since, and in his letter, wielded that the Lord would let 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. live to be as old as Methusaleh. Did I believe that slavery and prejudice could exist in this land nine hundred years longer. I would second the wish, and not only that Gerrit Smith should live thus long, but Lyndon King, Beriah Green, 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. , and such as those, who have bedwarfed themselves in their age, as Milton did in his, by keeping ahead so far. These are earth's noble spirits. Thank God, the time will come, if not speedily, still surely, when men shall acknowledge, by word as in their inmost soul, that righteousness is true greatness, and that there is no glory but in living in accordance with principles which are just and holy, and true.
I do not despair
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.
Let us take this to our hearts, at lest that slavery is a national sin, and nations are not fixed facts, but are continually, though may be slowly, passing away.
Faithfully yours,
WILLIAM G. ALLENAllen, 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., May 6, 1852.