Letter from Daniel Foster.

Friend Douglass:—In your paper of Dec. 17th, I notice an article under the heading, "The Position of Daniel Foster," on which I think a word of comment is needed. I do not suppose you intend to misrepresent the position of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. Yet the readers of your paper who do not also read the Liberator will be led astray by your remarks in the article, and will be made to regard the Massachusetts Society as intolerant and proscriptive. Judging by my own observation and experience I deem such an idea wholly unfounded and unjust. You say, "We publish certain inquiries, made by the Practical Christians as to the Anti-Slavery Orthodoxy of Daniel Foster, an agent of "the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society," who has committed the heresy of advising every abolitionist who could conscientiously do so, to vote for Horace Mann for Governor of Massachusetts. This would not seem on the face of it to be a very terrible transgression but that is owing somewhat to the point from which the thing is viewed. Taking the ground that all voting is of the devil, and that all abolitionists who do so are apostate and haters of the slave, the thing looks really black."

In the above extract from your editorial remarks, great injustice is done to the most efficient Anti-Slavery agency in our country. Your readers will at once inter that the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society holds these sentiments, and so inferring will be prejudiced against the society. Such inference is unjust. Wm. Lloyd 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. rejoices as much as any man in the anti-slavery efforts of political abolitionists These are political abolitionists who refuse to compromise with oppression. 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. is the noble leader of these men. But the Free Soil Party has stood on the ground of compromise. Mr. Garrison and those who act with him have condemned the policy which brings abolitionists into alliance with pro-slavery parties and men in order to secure a "slice of governmental loaf." They have ceased not, "day nor night," to show both the weakness and the criminality of this policy which has been so common and so disastrous with the anti-slavery political parties in our country. It is true that Mr. Garrison and the leading men and women in the Massachusetts Society are non voters for conscience sake. I differ

with them here. I think we must have political action. And if I have the opportunity to vote for a true man, I think duty calls me to the polls. I derive my right to vote from a principle antecedent to and more sacred than the Constitution of the United States, to wit the inalienable right of the governed to participate in the choice of the governor.—Woman has the same right to vote that man has. God gives this right to all responsible members of society. Human constituents and laws cannot confer it upon the subject nor take it away. By voting, then, I do not see that any one promises allegience to the Constitution or to the American laws. That Constitution as thus far and as now interpreted, applied, and executed, and all such laws as sustain slavery. I repudiate and disobey as wholly illegal and unjust. The Constitution as expounded by Mr. Spooner and Gerrit Smith I am ready to support, such an application being in harmony with the law of unchanging rights. But the men to whom you refer as the Massachusetts Society who are non voters, in this are as honest and true as Gerrit Smith in his position: and they are doing more to overthrow slavery than the whole army of political abolitionists. Your spasmodic electioneerers do nothing of abiding importance for the cause of impartial and universal liberty. Any imputation therefore upon their motives, any sneer at their principles is not only in bad taste but is criminal folly in the editor or the lecturer who calls himself an abolitionist. There is the most perfect harmony in the efforts made by Wm. Lloyd Garrison and Gerrit Smith. Each leases his life on the Gospel principle which enjoins no compromise with wrong. So, throughout the anti-slavery host, there ought to be perfect harmony of effort, on the only tenable ground, i.e., "no compromise with oppression," for the deliverance of the enslaved. To this grand work and in this uncompromising spirit I give myself with all joy. May the true reforming spirit guide all who loves the universal Father and his one family in the preservation of the anti-slavery cause. You will oblige me by inserting this letter in your paper. "Be sure you are right and then go ahead," and may you accomplish a great success, is the earnest wish of

Your brother,

DANIEL FOSTERFoster, Daniel

Daniel Foster (1816–64) was a minister from Massachusetts. Foster attended the Kimball Union Academy and Dartmouth in New Hampshire but spent much of his career in Massachusetts. He began his ministry as a Methodist, then became a Congregationalist, and finally a Unitarian. An ardent abolitionist, Foster was employed by the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society as a lecturer. After he left that organization, Foster heard a speech by John Brown and was inspired to go to Kansas to serve the free state cause there. By the time of the Civil War, however, Foster had returned to Massachusetts and volunteered as a chaplain for Massachusetts troops. A year later, he resigned that position to become a captain in a colored regiment. Foster was killed near Richmond, Virginia, in 1864. “Daniel Foster-Class of 1836,” Kimball Union Academy, kua.org; Elizabeth Hall Witherell, ed., The Writings of Henry David Thoreau-The Correspondence, Volume 2: 1849–1856 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2018), 262–23; C. Peter Ripley and Roy E. Finkenbine, eds., The Black Abolitionist Papers, 5 vols. (Chapel Hill, N.C.: North Carolina Press, 1986), 4:134. .

WEST BOYLSTON, MASS.
Dec. 21st, 1852.