Archibald Kenyon to Frederick Douglass, March 26, 1877

ARCHIBALD KENYON^{1Born in Athol, New York, Archibald Kenyon (1813–90) joined the Baptist ministry in 1835 at the encouragement of the Reverend Nathaniel Colver. Active in the American Baptist Free Mission Society, Kenyon edited the Free Mission Visitor on behalf of that antislavery organization. He held pastorates in Rhode Island, New York, Ohio, Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin. Kenyon was also the composer of more than a dozen popular hymns. The Baptist Almanac for the Year of Our Lord 1857 (Philadelphia, 1857), 29; Henry S. Burrage, Baptist Hymn Writers and Their Hymns (Portland, Me., 1888), 368–69; Alfred T. Andreas, History of Chicago, From the Earliest Period to the Present Times, 3 vols. (Chicago, 1884), 2:320–21; Find a Grave (online).} TO FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Chatsworth, Ill.^{2 Chatsworth was a small farming community southwest of Chicago, built along the Peoria and Oquawka Railroad in Livingston County, Illinois. Seltzer, Columbia Lippincott Gazetteer, 378.} 26 March 1877.

HON FRED DOUGLASS

DEAR SIR

You will pardon an old time Abolition in addressing a note to you at this time—Having been associated with such Gentlemen as Rev. Nath Colver^{3The son of a New England Baptist minister, Nathaniel Colver (1794–1870) entered his father’s occupation and became one of the earliest leaders in that denomination to adopt immediateabolitionist views. After serving in a number of pastorates, he began preaching at the Tremont Temple in Boston. In the late 1830s, Colver helped lead a revolt among abolitionists against the anticlerical views of the Garrisonians in Massachusetts. In 1842 he became a founder of the American Baptist Anti-Slavery Convention, which protested tolerance of slaveholders in the denomination’s mission societies. After later pastorates in Detroit and Cincinnati, Colver was president of the Freedman’s Institute in Richmond, Virginia, from 1867 to 1870. Archibald Kenyon named a son after Colver. J. A. Smith, Memoir of Rev. Nathaniel Colver, D.D., Lectures, Plans of Sermons, etc. (Boston, 1873); McKivigan, War against Proslavery Religion, 48, 62, 87–89; ACAB, 1: 699; DAB, 4: 324–25.} C P Grosvenor,^{4Cyrus Pitt Grosvenor (1792–1879) was born in Grafton, Massachusetts, and graduated from Dartmouth College in 1815. Ordained a Baptist minister, he was pastor to a series of congregations in Connecticut and Massachusetts. An early abolitionist, Grosvenor was an agent of the American Anti-Slavery Society in the 1830s and attended the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840. He was a founder of the American Baptist Free Mission Society, an abolitionist come-outer denomination. In 1849, Colver became president of New York Central College, an early institution with an integrated faculty and student body. Frederick Clifton Pierce, History of Grafton, Worcester County, Massachusetts: From Its Early Settlement by the Indians in 1647 to the Present Time, 1879 (Worcester, Mass., 1879), 615; McKivigan, War against Proslavery Religion, 48, 87, 130.} Dr Corless^{5Hiram S. Corliss (1793–1877) was a successful physician in Union Village (present-day Greenwich) in Washington County, New York. His abolitionist principles led him to found an antislavery come-outer church and become active in the Underground Railroad. Tom Calarco, The Underground Railroad in the Adirondack Region (Jefferson, N.C. 2004), 18, 34, 57, 85, 92, 95, 262; William Richard Cutter, New England Families: Genealogical and Memorial; Achievements of Her People in the Making of Commonwealths and the Founding of a Nation, 4 vols. (New York, 1913), 3: 1159.} M A Mowrey^{6Possibly William H. Mowry (1811–50), a member of Hiram Corliss’s antislavery Free Church in Union Village, New York. He and his wife, Angelina, were well-known Underground Railroad conductors in the Adirondack Mountains region of New York. Calarco, Underground Railroad in the Adirondack Region, 21, 53, 117, 122, 145.} Hon Gerritt Smith Wm Goodell^{7William Goodell, (1792–1878) a New York abolitionist and newspaper editor, helped form both the American Anti-Slavery Society and the Liberty party. As a writer and editor, Goodell contributed to a number of reform and antislavery publications, including the Genius of Temperance, the Emancipator, the Friend of Man, the American Jubilee, the Radical Abolitionist, and Principia. Goodell’s abolitionist ideals did not always fall in line with those of the Garrisonians. On religion, Goodell agreed wholeheartedly that established churches supported proslavery ideology, and he went so far as to establish his own nonsectarian church in Honeoye, New York, on the principles of temperance and antislavery. In contrast, Goodell broke with the Garrisonians on the issue of politics. He helped found the Liberty party as a way to use political means to fight against slavery. Gerald Sorin, The New York Abolitionists: A Case Study of Political Radicalism (Westport, Conn., 1971), 57–62; Perry, Radical Abolitionism, 46–48, 180–83; DAB, 7: 384–85.} Joshua Leavitt^{8Born to a wealthy family in Heath, Massachusetts, Joshua Leavitt (1794–1873) studied at Yale University and practiced law first in his hometown and then in Putney, Vermont. In 1823 he returned to Yale to study for the congregational ministry. After a pastorate in Stratford, Connecticut, Leavitt accepted a missionary position with the American Seaman’s Friend Society in 1828. He was soon drawn into evangelical reformism and served as editor of the New York Evangelist (1830–37). Recruited to abolitionist ranks by Arthur and Lewis Tappan, Leavitt took over the editorship of the New York Emancipator in 1837 and made it a strident critic of the Garrisonian wing of abolitionism. A founder of the Liberty party, he was a leader in its merger with antislavery Whigs and Democrats to form the Free Soil party in 1848. That same year, Leavitt accepted an editorial position with a new evangelical newspaper, the New York Independent, where he managed daily office operations and wrote occasional articles until his death. New York Independent, 23, 30 January, 6, 13 February 1873; Hugh Davis, Joshua Leavitt: Evangelical Abolitionist (Baton Rouge, La., 1990); ANB (online).} &c &c & having heard you when you first came North—I can but congratulate you upon the result following our great Battle in behalf of your race & of our humanity as well God, has done great things for us & our cause where-of we are glad For many years yes from—1842—, till its disorganization I was with the “Free Mission Society,”^{9 Baptist abolitionists had worked since the mid-1830s to persuade their denomination’s missionary societies to cease appointing slave-owning missionaries. Despite the sectional schism of the American Baptist Home Mission Society and the American Baptist Missionary Union in 1845, militant abolitionists complained that those bodies continued to accept financial contributions from southerners. These abolitionists created their own organization, the American Baptist Free Mission Society, which dispatched its own missionaries, published newspapers and tracts, and established several colleges. These come-outer Baptists played prominent roles as officers of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society and as supporters of the Liberty party. McKivigan, War against Proslavery Religion, 88–90, 93, 99–101; McKivigan, “The American Baptist Free Mission Society: Abolitionist Reaction to the 1845 Baptist Schism,” Foundations: The Journal of the American Baptist Historical Society, 21:340–55 (October–December 1978).} & through it sought the freedom & elevation of your enslaved people, & now I rejoice that Slavery is dead & that as one of the oppressed race you are placed in so prominent a place & ake a lively interest in Prest Hays^{10Rutherford B. Hayes.} experiment with the south, for it is an experiment & one I should not have made—! I insist that Packard^{11Stephen S. Packard.} of La & Chamberlain^{12Daniel Henry Chamberlain.} of S. C. [illegible] be recognized instantly The Slavery Spirit is still alive & kicking—all it lacks is power & should be dealt with not by pacification, but by force. The idea of pacifying rebels is not only preposterous but ridiculous—Please accept my assurance of interest in your success.

A KENYON

[P.S.] My address is Rev. A Kenyon Chatsworth Ill

ALS: General Correspondence File, reel 3, frames 80R–81, FD Papers, DLC

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