Mr. Frederick Douglass: Dear Sir:—

Your paper of the 16th of last month contains an article from your corresponding editor, John Thomas, Esq., under the caption, "What is to be done." The author of the article appears to be quite desirous that "the Free Democracy at Pittsburg in August, and at Canastota in September, could agree upon Charles Curkee of Wisconsin for President," remarking, that "all kinds of anti-slavery men would unite joyfully on the Hon. Charles DurkeeDurkee, Charles

Charles Durkee (1805—70), politician and pacifist, was born in Royalton, Vermont, and educated in the town schools and at the Burlington Academy. A merchant, he emigrated in 1836 to Wisconsin, where he was one of the founders of Southport, later Kenosha. Durkee served in the territorial legislature before being elected as a Free Soiler to two terms in the U.S. House of Representatives (1849—53). At the World's Peace Conference in Paris in 1849 he was one of twenty-three American delegates. He later became president of the short-lived Wisconsin Peace Society. After joining the Republican party, Durkee served one term in the U.S. Senate (1855—61) and was appointed governor of Utah Territory in 1865. Curti, American Peace Crusade, 172, 217; BDAC, 839. ."

I was under the impression that the Convention to be holden at Canastota on the first day of next month is to be a Liberty Party Convention, not a Free Soil meeting. If I am not greatly mistaken, Mr. Thomas has been very anxious for some time past, to bring about a unity of the Liberty Party and the Free Soil (???) party; but I was not aware until reading the article under consideration, that the union had already taken place. I should think that Libery Party people had suffered sufficient in consequence of the absorption that had taken place at the great Buffalo Convention in 1848, without seeking a similar treatment. Or has Mr. Thomas left the Liberty Party, and gone over to the Free Soil? Since the unfortunate dissension among Anti-Slavery people, many years since, and the consequent disruption, I have not ceased to deplore the situation of affairs, and have always used what means at my command, in my humble ways, to, if possible, heal the breach, and unite all Anti-Slavery persons in suitable efficient action against the accursed demon slavery. But I have never [considered] it my duty—never felt myself "called"—to enlist in the ranks of the Free Soil (???) party. On the contrary, I have ever considered, since the organization of that party, that it has been a great hinderance to the abolition of Slavery. If the wing of the Anti-Slavery party, of which William Lloyd Garrison, Esq.Garrison, 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. , is justly the pride, and leader, and the Liberty Party could unite, there would then be a true land of true Abolitionists. Oh! that the Union could be brought about! I love the term Abolitionist, so hated by Free Soilers, Whigs, Democrats (??) and other Pro-Slavery people.

What pretension the Hon. Charles Durkee can have to a nomination from the Liberty Party, I am at a loss to know. I should think that he would not wish one. He is among the number of those who left the Liberty Party, and joined the Free Soilers in 1848, and canvassed the State of Wisconsin for the purpose of converting Liberty Party men to that organization, telling them that they were "behind the times." The progress that he made was of a retrograde movement.—He is not one of that number—and there are many of them—who, after having joined the Free Soil party, became convinced of their error, repented, and done "works meet for repentance." He holds his present seat in Congress as a Free Soil Democrat.

For "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,"

Jacob LybrandLybrand, Jacob

Jacob Lybrand (c. 1805–75) was born in Philadelphia but was living in Wisconsin by at least 1836. In Wisconsin, he was very active in the Liberty Party and the Liberty Association. Lybrand was put forward on several occasions for office and in 1848 was a delegate to the Buffalo Free Soil convention. He arrived in Iowa in about 1849, and settled in Allamakee County in 1850/51, planning the town that took his name. Lybrand also founded Knob Prairie (now West Union). Eventually, he relocated north to Minnesota, moving around frequently, until 1875. “Jacob Lybrand,” Redwood (Minn.) Gazette, 4 March 1875; Early M. Hancock, Past and Present of Alamakee County, Iowa, 2 vols. (Chicago: S. J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1913), 1: 498; Reinhard O. Johnson, The Liberty Party, 1840–1848: Antislavery Third-Party Politics in the United States (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 2021), 358. .

LyBrand, Allmakee Co., Iowa,

August 10, 1852.