ROCHESTER, Sept. 6th, 1853.

DEAR DOUGLASS:—I perceive that your
old friends of the Liberator and Standard
have, of late, wonderfully changed their tone
towards you. I was led to inquire what
could be the cause of this change. I have
looked upon you as an earnest and able de
fender of the anti slavery cause. You were, for
a number of years, an able advocate of Gar
rison's peculiar views of anti-slavery action.
During all this time, you stood high in the
estimation of 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 party. But
when, as I believe, from honest conviction,
you advocated the propriety of carrying your
anti-slavery to the ballot box, their tone be
came altered. Instead of honeyed words of
commendation, maledictions in abundance
are poured out. According to the philoso
phy of these gentlemen, no man has a right
to change his opinion; or if he changes at
all, he must wait to see in what position
Messrs. Garrison, Phillips & Co. are. Is
this manly? Is this manganimous? Has
Garrison himself never changed his views
on political action? What did he mean
when he said years ago, "We maintain
that there are, at the present time, the
highest obligations resting on the people of
the free States to remove slavery by moral and

political action, as prescribed in the constitu
tion of the United States?" In this sentence
he urges the duty of political action, and
acknowledges the power and propriety of
acting under the constitution. What is his
present position? The very reverse of all
this. No greater sin could be committed
than to vote at all under the constitution.—Is this the gentleman who never changes his
opinion? Is this the gentleman who is so
liberal in his censure of those who act as he
would have them act in 1833? He then
thought that political action under the con
stitution was imperative and binding on ev
ery friend of liberty. Now every man is a
traitor to liberty who uses his political fran
chise. How can you always be in company
with those who are thus given to such
doubling and tergiversation? You had bet
ter, my friend, continue in the consistent
course you are now pursuing, and follow the
leadings of your own convictions of duty.

You have spent too many precious years
of your life in endeavoring to prove what is
particularly gratifying to slaveholders, and
the pro-slavery office seekers of our nation,
viz: that the constitution is a pro-slavery
document. You may rely upon it that no
course is more gratifying to them. This I
have repeatedly witnessed when debates have
taken place on this topic. When the consti
tution has been pronounced with triumph
and emphasis a pro-slavery document, every
Hunker Democrat and Hunker Whig in the
audience, have shouted "Amen" at the top

of their voice. And what has been exceed
ingly humiliating to a true and discriminat
ing abolitionist, such applause has been very
acceptable to the speaker, although it has
come from the tainted breath of those who
are wading knee deep in political corrup
tion.

I have thus freely remarked on one ob
jection, which the Boston school of anti-sla
very philosophers are urging against you.—On some other occasion, I will touch upon
another topic.

I remain your friend,

ALPHA.