For Frederick Douglass' Paper.

NEW YORK, July 16th, 1853.

MR. EDITOR:—The Buckeyes and their friends have been "about," I tell you. They
not only carried the meeting, in Dr. Pen
nington's church, by storm last night, but
carried the Sixth Avenue cars, and the Crys
tal Palace during the day. Our phlegmatic
and fat fellow Gothamites have been "laying
pipe," or lines of circumvallation since the
May meetings, about the shamefully exclu
sive Sixth Avenue cars; and they have been
casting the "Horoscope," as to whether col
ored people would be admitted to the Crys
tal Palace—(on this last subject it has been
whispered that the minister of St. Phillips,
by special request of the Churchwarden and
Vestry, has nearly prepared a greasy sermon
to reconcile even his parishioners to the in
dignity of exclusion from the Palace; when
a young Buckeye and his friends, in a few
minutes, quietly toed the mark, and settled
the question. Honor to the West! It GROWS
MEN!! ALL HAIL TO THE PRODUCER! I sup
pose that wicked David JenkinsJenkins, David

David Jenkins (c. 1816–76) was a Black abolitionist from Columbus, Ohio. Born in Virginia and educated at Oberlin College, Jenkins was described by Martin R. Delany as a highly skilled craftsman: “[He] received by contract, the painting, glazing, and papering of some of the public buildings of the State, in autumn 1847. He is much respected in the capital city of his state, being extensively patronized, having on contract, the great ‘Neill House,’ and many of the largest gentlemen’s residences in the city and neighborhood, to keep in finish. Mr. Jenkins is a very useful man and member of society.” Interested in the elevation of Black people in Ohio, Jenkins organized a debating society in Columbus and was active in the Masonic Lodge and in the temperance and abolition movements. He organized the first state convention for Blacks in Ohio in 1844 and was elected vice president and appointed to the central committee during Ohio’s State Colored Convention held in Cleveland on 11 September 1852. Jenkins was a delegate from Ohio at the Colored National Convention held in Rochester in July 1853 and was appointed to its finance committee. During the Civil War, he served as a recruiting agent at Camp Delaware. Jenkins was elected vice president of the Equal Rights League Convention held on 21 September 1865 in Cleveland and was appointed sergeant at arms for the 1867 State Convention of Colored People in Columbus. Jenkins removed to Mississippi in 1872 and became a member of that state’s legislature. He died suddenly in Canton, Mississippi in 1876 and foul play was immediately suspected. Frederick Douglass' Paper, 15 September 1843, 1 October 1852, 20 May, 15 July 1853; Liberator, 21 July 1865; Daily Cleveland Herald, 25 July 1863, 21 September 1865; Ripley (Ohio) Bee, 10 July 1867; Ohio State Journal, 25 February 1870; Cincinnati Commercial, 17 April 1872; Cincinnati Daily Gazette, 27 September 1876; Cincinnati Daily Times, 13 September 1876; New York Age, 16 January 1892; 1870 U.S. Census, Ohio, Franklin County, 55; Delany, Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People, 118; Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, 4:73. , of Ohio,
would add "three groans for the East; it
uses up manhood; down with the consumer!"
Consarn the fellow!

PRESIDENTIANA.

Standing in the procession—waiting—mob
on the 14th inst., as the President passed
along Broadway with his beaver up, and rath
er off, some uncircumcised white man im
pudently remarked, "Why, his hair looks
like a nigger's!" And so does his complex
ion: well, now, "I want to know!" Where
is EthiopWilson, William Joseph ("Ethiop")

William Joseph Wilson (1818–?), a free black man from New Jersey, operated a bootmaking shop in New York City as early as the 1830s. In the 1840s he became a secondary school teacher and later a principal of a black school in Brooklyn. He was an activist on behalf of black education, encouraging access and attendance, and even opened his own library. Wilson also campaigned to secure the franchise for New York African Americans. He served as a member of the Committee of Thirteen, organized by New York black leaders to stop enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act. In the early 1850s Wilson’s letters appeared frequently in Frederick Douglass’ Paper, and Douglass referred to him as the newspaper’s “Brooklyn correspondent.” Wilson’s letters to the newspaper, published under the pseudonym “Ethiop,” were often part of an ongoing debate about the condition of blacks in New York and the United States. Wilson’s most frequent sparring partner in the war of letters was “Communipaw,” actually James McCune Smith, a prominent black physician in New York City. Carleton Mabee, Black Education in New York State: From Colonial to Modern Times (Syracuse, N.Y., 1979), 54, 63-67, 123, 129, 155, 158; Foner and Walker, Black State Conventions, 1:79-88; Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 87, 212, 229; Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, 4:144-45n. ?

Has a little tar, a very little tar, crept into
the [illegible] chair? or is it only a proof of
the theory, that the residence during several
generations in our continent gradually
changes the complexion from white to cop
per color. Where is CommunipawSmith, James McCune

James 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. ?

The Metropolitan Hotel of our city has a
large corps of well-drilled and officered col
ored waiters. At the magnificent banquet
last night, when the President rose to speak,
the room, by his request, was cleared of these
attendants: but by construction of the en
trances, our brethren (as in other cases which
might be cited) stood at a very wide door,
which, somehow, could not be shut, as listen-
ers. Well, you know the Metropolitan is at
the corner of Broadway and Prince Streets,
and Dr. Pennington's church is two short
squares off—, so there were two great
meetings within hearing of each other, and
each easily heard the cheers of the other.

As I was saying, the President rose, and
the room was cleared of his colored breth
ren, (he himself might easily pass for a col
ored man,) and the President said, in the
course of his remarks (now first reported ex
clusively for Frederick Douglass' Paper,) "if
colored men could drill with muskets, as well as
they do with plates, they would make a dangerous enemy."

Well now, "I want to know." The edge
of this joke, is, that the very men who caused
this remark, the very waiters ejected from
the room, were, almost to a man, well-drilled
soldiers, being members of the Hannibal
Guards, Carrie Guards and Tinker Guards.
And it does reflect very great credit on the
military acuteness of Franklin Pierce, that
he saw at once, from their movements, these
soldiers in disguise. Where is your literary
Editor? Cannot she furnish, just here, that
fine passage from Scott, where the monks,
bearing the coffin, with a live warrior in it,
suddenly throw off their cowls and cloaks,
draw swords and "go in?"

Yours,

AGAIN.