ABNER BATES¹Probably Abner Bates (1807–90), a Syracuse, New York, tanner and store owner. Bates was an abolitionist religious “comeouter” who quit the Presbyterians in protest of their fellowship of slaveholders. He was active in the Underground Railroad; some of the planning for the Jerry Rescue was conducted in his store. Bates also was a prominent member of the New York State Temperance Society. NASS, 11 July 1850; FDP, 8 June 1855; Gurney S. Strong, Early Landmarks of Syracuse (Syracuse, N.Y., 1894), 281, 291; Milton C. Sernett, North Star Country: Upstate New York and the Crusade for African American Freedom (Syracuse, N.Y., 2002), 321. TO FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Syracuse, [N.Y.] 11 Feb[ruary] 1853[.]
Frederick Douglass or Wm Bloss²William Clough Bloss (1795–1863) was born in West Stockbridge, Massachusetts. A committed abolitionist, Bloss was also an advocate for reforms in temperance laws, capital punishment, and woman suffrage. In 1833, Bloss promoted a series of antislavery meetings and helped organize the first abolitionist convention in Monroe County, New York. Active in the Underground Railroad, Bloss sheltered fugitive slaves in his home. Along with other members of the Rochester Anti-Slavery Society, he began publishing the Rights of Man, an abolitionist newspaper, in 1834. Ten years later the Whig party elected Bloss to the state assembly, where he unsuccessfully fought for a state amendment banning discrimination in voting rights based on race. ANB, 3:54–55.
} Rochester,
These men³These fugitive slaves cannot be identified. Came from Mc Cune Smith⁴James 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. New York and I have ticketed them to you trusting that you will see them put on their way from Rochester Yours Truly
A. BATES⁵William Bloss adds a note, dated 12 February 1853, indicating his receipt of Bates’s letter and money via Maria G. Porter (1805–96). Porter was born in Bristol, Maine. At twenty years of age, she moved with her family, to Rochester, New York, where she remained until her death. Maria helped to found the Rochester Ladies Anti-Slavery Sewing Society and served as its treasurer for many years. She ran a boardinghouse in Rochester, which was a stop on the Underground Railroad from which she helped many fugitive slaves escape to freedom. 1850 U.S. Census, New York, Monroe County, 57; The Rochester Directory, Containing a General Directory of the Citizens, a Business Directory, and the City and County Register for the Year Beginning July, 1[,] 1880 (Rochester, 1880), 58; FDP, 26 February 1852; Rochester Herald, 14 December 1896; New York Times, 15 December 1896; (Bangor, Me.) Daily Whig & Courier, 17 December 1896; William F. Peck, History of Rochester and Monroe County, New York, 2 vols. (New York, 1908), 1:243.

ALS: Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society Papers, MiU-C.