Frederick Douglass, Esq., Cor. Secretary of N. Y. State A. S. Society: Dear Brother:—My first quarterly report, as agent of the N. Y. State A. S. Society, should have been made at the commencement of the present month; but a variety of circumstances—sickness a portion of the time being one of them—has prevented my making it out till now.

I have labored in Oneida, Herkimer, Madison, Tioga, and Broome Counties—have delivered forty-three addresses—attended eight regular conventions—obtained twenty-five subscribers for Frederick Douglass' Paper, and collected one hundred and forty-five dollars and eighty-nine cents. These results are not as favorable as I could desire; yet when all things are taken into consideration, they are perhaps as much as could have reasonably been expected. For, nearly one month of the time, I was confined at home by a violent attack of sickness; but for which, more, of course, would have been accomplished. Providence, however, has ordered it as it is. As I look out upon the harvest and behold its greatness, and the fewness of its laborers; as in imagination I hear the wail of the oppressed, the groan of the bereaved slave mother, and the shriek of the maiden whipped for her love of virtue; as I read the history of God's dealings with slaveholding nations, scattering them like chaff before the storm of his indignation; and as I behold the apathy which now yet exists in the mass of the people of this nation on the subject of slavery, I confess, that were it not for the divine promises touching the future triumph of truth over error, my soul would sink within me. Thank God! it is His will that the truth shall triumph. The earth is yet to be filled with the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.—Let us therefore rejoice that we are permitted to labor, though in the face of trials and tribulations, for the bringing in of such a time.

Allow me a few words in reference to the field of the Society's labors, and what I think ought to be done.

1. And first—of the size of the field. The field which the Society proposes to cultivate is the State of New York—a field far more extensive than at first thought seems to strike us, stretching as it does from the shores of the Atlantic to [those of] Lake Erie; and from the borders of Canada to those of Pennsylvania, and containing forty-six thousand square miles of territory. The population of the State is now more than three millions ([3,007,000]) a number larger than that of the population of the United States, at the time of the Declaration of Independence, within some 300,000 of as many as were in the nation when the first census was taken in 17[90], and considerably more than half of the population of England, when William and Mary ascended the throne of the British Empire. It is the population of a nation. A nation is the field of the Society's labors.

2. Next—of the condition of the field—Were we to make the number of meeting-houses and church steeples pointing heavenward the basis of our estimate of the condition of our field of labor, we would arrive, doubtless, at a far more flattering result than if we should make works of love and deeds of mercy the basis. The entire vote for President, at the late election, will not vary much from 325,000 in this State. Of these, some 25,000 have only been cast for the anti-slavery candidates! If the 25,000 we add 75,000, as the number of those who are anti-slavery in feeling, but who voted for Scott to keep Pierce out, or for Pierce, to keep Scott out, and 75,000 is certainly high enough, we shall have 100,000, as the number of political abolitionists and anti-slavery sympathisers, or less than one fifth of the whole number of voters! Of course, if we examine the vote of particular portions of the State, a still greater barrenness is observable. Columbia County, with some 8,000 voters, only cast 7 votes for the Free Soil candidates.—Greene County has a population of over 55,000, about 6,000 of whom vote, yet she only had 16 Free Soil voters. [Ulster] County has a population of 60,000, her Free Soil vote is only [26]. Oswego County has probably done the [best], her population is over [62,000] with probably some 10,000 voters, her Free Soil vote is 2[...], little more than one [...].

H[...] better state of things exist in this State [...] is remembered that [...]. Anti-Slavery wheat cannot be reaped where little else than pro-slavery tares are sown. I have visited places within the period included in this report, where I was assured that some four years had elapsed since an anti-slavery lecture had been heard. In the village of Chenango Forks, situated on the borders of Broome and Chenango Counties, I was unable to find anything better than a "Seward Whig." You may judge how much he cared for the anti-slavery cause, from the fact, that when the friends in Binghamton sent him the handbills containing my appointment for a lecture in the place, he very carefully packed them away under his counter, where, on my going to the place to meet the appointment, I found them 'guilty of as little agitation as the "Union Committee" could have desired.

3. What is necessary to be done? Once, Madison and Oswego, which have done themselves so much honor by triumphantly electing 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. to Congress, were as densely pro-slavery as Greene and Ulster.—What has wrought the change? Anti-slavery agitation, by means of lectues, conventions, and publications. Whatever a man soweth, that shall he also reap, is just as full of encouragement to sow the seeds of truth, as if warning against sowing unrighteousness. Let agitation then be continued and increased all over the State. To do this, lecturers should be multiplied. There is room in this State for a dozen or more energetic and talented lecturers, each of whom could spend from one to two months in a county, visiting every one of its villages and towns. Let the lecturers go forth "two and two together" [...] of vote, and not single-handed and [illegible].

Cheap, and well-written and well-adjusted tracts embodying anti-slavery facts, statistics and arguments and appeals, should be scattered like the leaves in Autumn, by the lecturers and friends.

[...]iduous efforts to introduce newspapers [of the] right stamp should also be made.—Containing as it does political abolitionism, in a purer state than it is to be found in any others, Frederick Douglass' Paper should be the first sought to be introduced.

And lastly, in every county there should be at least one anti-slavery society. Where there is a sufficient number of friends, every town should be organized. Each of these should hold at least two meetings in the year, to which some one or more of the State Society's lecturers should go.

4. But how is all this to be accomplished? Where can so many lecturers be obtained? and if obtained, how can they be supported? To print tracts will also cost money, and how can we get it? Let me say, in reply, that I feel confident, that if the right principle is adopted, and proper means used, ten dollars can be obtained for anti-slavery purposes where one now is. Let the State Society appear before the community as a missionary body, as in point of fact it is. Let every lecturer be regarded as he ought to be, as a missionary. If there is a missionary on earth, the anti-slavery lecturer is one. The friends of the anti-slavery cause ought to contribute as regularly to the friends of an anti-slavery society as they do to any professedly missionary society. Indeed, contributions to the former are far more important than to the latter. Unless the cause of freedom triumphs in this nation, in the abolition of slavery, the nation is lost; and with it is lost the ability to bless the world. Besides, it is a lamentable, yet an instructive fact, that as a nation, we are every year making, by means of slavery, more heathen than all of our missionaries are the means of converting from the ranks of heathenism abroad!—Hence it is that I regard anti-slavery societies as the most important missionary societies. And hence it is that I would endeavor to appeal to the missionary spirit which exists in the State. Were the Executive Committee of the State Society to send forth an appeal to every anti-slavery man in the State, I have not the least doubt that the means of sustaining one or two lecturers would be the result, without any additional effort. I may be mistaken, but such is my belief.

Every lecturer sent forth by the society, would, of course, be able to do something in the way of collections; though he ought not to be made to depend upon what he himself may be able to collect. Many places in the state need anti-slavery labor, where not a cent scarcely can be collected; and where, indeed, no effort ought to be made to take collections. And these, in fact, are the places that stand the most in need of such labor.—They are the regions of heathenism and darkness, so far as an anti-slavery spirit is concerned.

Lastly—by organizing as many counties, and towns as possible, more friends for the cause can be obtained. These organizations of their hearts were in the cause, would of course be willing to, and would adopt means to raise funds.

These remarks may not be the thing wanted; yet they may be the means of exciting your own mind, or the mind of some one else to devise a better plan than I should have been able to indicate. If so—I shall be satisfied. Let us then, by all means, have some plan for the multiplication of conventoins, lectures, and anti-slavery influences.—It is folly to depend upon any merely political organization. The political party simply reaps the harvest, the seeds of which are, and must be sown by the anti-slavery societies. But for the labors of Mr. 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 his associates in the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, and in the American Anti-Slavery Society, who believes that the little state of Massachusetts would have given so handsome a free soil vote as she has? And had New York possessed, for the last half dozen years, an active and energetic society, far superior results would have been realized.

I remain, dear brother,

Yours for the slave,

Geo. W. Ritchie.