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CHARLES R. DOUGLASS TO FREDERICK DOUGLASS
Washington[,] D.C. 20 January 1872.
DEAR FATHER,
My delay in writing to you has been in consequence of your being constantly on the wing.1Douglass’s itinerary indicates that he was touring the Midwest in January 1872. He spoke in Champaign, Illinois, on 19 January; in Greenville, Illinois, on the 23rd; in Richmond, Indiana, on 29 January; and in Columbus, Ohio, on the 30th. His next known speaking engagement was in Elmira, New York, on 23 February 1872. Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 4: xxx. Though I am kept pretty busy I don’t urge that as an excuse for my negligence. I have the supervision of two school buildings now being erected in the County,2By an act of Congress in May 1802, the nation’s new capital city became a political entity, with its own mayor and city council. The federal district (i.e., the District of Columbia), which was created around the new city, comprised five distinct governmental units: Alexandria (the town), Alexandria County, Washington County (which included Anacostia), the town of Georgetown, and the city of Washington. The Douglass brothers were residents of Washington County. Louise Daniel Hutchinson, The Anacostia Story: 1608–1930 (Washington, D.C., 1977), 21–22. and in connection with my clerical duties I am kept closely and continually employed.3From 1871 to 1874, Charles R. Douglass served as secretary and treasurer of the Washington County Board of Trustees and also as a school trustee. Although the editors were unable to link Douglass directly with the construction of a specific school in Washington County, the two schools that were built during this period were the Mt. Zion School (later renamed Howard School) and Hillsdale School. Hutchinson, Anacostia Story, 85–86. I have successfully baffled all attempts made by Brown4The editors have not been able to confirm the identity of Mr. Brown, but there were two men named Brown (Solomon G. Brown and Marshall Brown) involved in District of Columbia politics at the time this letter was written, so it is likely that one or the other is Charles Douglass’s “Mr. Brown.” The first African American employee of the Smithsonian Institution, Solomon G. Brown (1829–1906) was a well-known and highly regarded resident of the District who held numerous local positions, including serving as a member of the House of Delegates from 1871 to 1874. He represented both Barry’s Farm and Anacostia in the House of Delegates, and was known to be especially interested in public education. He defeated Frederick Douglass, Jr., in his bid for election to the House of Delegates in 1871. That same year, Brown ran into conflict with both the senior Frederick Douglass and his son Lewis over the issue of renaming Barry’s Farm Hillsboro. Brown supported the name change, but Douglass vehemently opposed it. The reason for Douglass’s opposition is unclear, but some scholars have speculated that it might have been due to his recollection of a slave community called Hillsboro in his native Talbot County, Maryland. Against Douglass’s objections, Brown succeeded in passing a bill in favor of the change in the House of Delegates, but Lewis Douglass effectively killed the bill in the Legislative Council by sending it to a committee for further study. When the name was fi nallychanged in 1874, Barry’s Farm became Hillsdale, not Hillsboro. The second Mr. Brown involved in District politics was the very wealthy Marshall Brown (1816–81), a former slave owner and the former co-owner of Brown’s Hotel; his son-in-law Richard Wallach had served as the Republican mayor ofthe nation’s capital from 1861 to 1868. Little is known about Marshall Brown’s activities or views: in 1872 he was a school trustee, and in 1868 his son-in-law had been voted out of office, largely by African Americans, in response to his outspoken opposition to black suffrage. 1850 U.S. Census, District of Columbia, Washington, 232B; 1860 U.S. Census, District of Columbia, Washington, 258; 1870 U.S. Census, District of Columbia, Washington, 84; 1880 U.S. Census, District of Columbia, Washington, 50; Laws of the District of Columbia (Washington, D.C., 1872), 44; Hutchinson, Anacostia Story, 86–87, 93, 95–97; Find a Grave (online). for the removal of the school house. I have been before the Legislature, and my letters and testimony showing Brown to be a person given to petty lying to carry his points,—are to be published in the report of the Comm on schools in that body. The building opposite me is nearly ready for the roof, the sides having been closed in this week. Brown got tired fighting me, and turned his attention to Lew. He has failed all round.5The editors cannot identify the subject of Brown’s attack on Lewis Douglass, whom President Grant had appointed to fill out his father’s term on the upper council of the District’s territorial government. But if Brown is indeed Solomon G. Brown, it might have had something to do with the fight over changing the name of Barry’s Farm to Hillsboro. Hutchinson, Anacostia Story, 97.
Langston has simply made a fool of himself by trying to build himself up in running you down.6Although the growing animosity between Douglass and John Mercer Langston was public knowledge at the time this letter was written, the first significant reference to their personal feud did not appear in the pages of the New National Era until May 1872, when an unsigned letter to the paper’s readers acknowledged Langston’s recent “spiteful attack” against Douglass, asserting that Douglass had done absolutely nothing to warrant it. In January 1872, however, there was little or no evidence that Langston, a well-regarded member of Howard University’s law faculty, was publicly denouncing Douglass. Instead, the paper’s coverage of Langston was mostly focused on his ongoing support of Sumner’s civil rights bill, in and around Washington, D.C. NNE, 28 December 1871, 11 January 1872, 13 January 1872, 18 January 1872, 2 May 1872; Bernier and Taylor, If I Survive, 488–89. He took your letter published in last weeks Era7Nine days earlier, Douglass had published a letter in the New National Era in response to rumors that he was opposed to Senator Charles Sumner’s supplementary civil rights bill. Douglass dismissed the false claim, noting the absurdity of the idea that he would engage in actions directly contrary to his life’s work. He went on to explain that if he had not been actively engaged in promoting Sumner’s bill, it was solely due to the fact that his busy lecture schedule had kept him away from Washington, D.C., for long stretches of time. NNE, 11 January 1872. to Senator Sumner,8Charles Sumner. in order to get him to say something against you that he might carry out. He also, at a public meeting of students, said that you had sent a letter here boasting of being accommodated at the same Hotel where the Grand Duke stopped,9Grand Duke Alexei Alexandrovich (1850–1908), fourth son of Tsar Alexander II of Russia and his first wife, Marie of Hesse, was sent on what became an extended goodwill tour of the world in the fall of 1871. The American leg of the journey began on 21 November 1871, when he arrived in New York City. The grand duke reached Chicago on 31 December 1871. While in Chicago, he and his party stayed at the Tremont House hotel. The Russians left Chicago on 2 January 1872, taking a train to Milwaukee. The grand duke left the United States on 22 February 1872, sailing out of Pensacola, Florida, for Cuba, where he began what became a lengthy tour of Latin and South America. He then sailed to South Africa, reached Japan in October 1872, and returned to Russia (landing in Vladivostok) in late November, arriving back in Moscow on 5 December 1872. Lee A. Farrow, Alexis in America: A Russian Grand Duke’s Tour, 1871–1872 (Baton Rouge, La., 2014), 123–24, 131. and representing that you claimed that you had all your rights.10In his 11 January 1872 letter to the New National Era, Douglass mentioned that he was currently staying in “one of the best rooms in one of the best hotels” in Chicago, and that it was the same hotel that had hosted the grand duke on his recent visit to the city. Douglass noted those facts in support of his argument that in being able to do so without opposition, he was in effect “illustrating” the “principles” that Sumner was hoping to enshrine through his bill. He also contrasted the ease and comfort with which he was now able to travel with the difficulties he had faced earlier in his public career. Douglass concluded his letter by explaining that he believed Sumner’s bill, which, he stated, he supported more “for its educational tendency than for anything else,” would lead “the American people” to a “higher point of civilization,” and that he was a “co-worker” and “not against” Sumner and his allies. NNE, 11 January 1872. He got his dose the next day in the Senate chamber, in the presence of the largest and most intelligent assemblage of colored persons I have ever beheld in those Gallerys, when Senator Sumner in his great speech11In a speech delivered in the Senate Chamber on 15 January 1872 in support of his supplementary civil rights bill, Senator Sumner referred to Douglass as a “gentleman of unquestioned ability and character, remarkable as an orator, of refined manners, and personally agreeable.” NNE, 25 January 1872. spoke in the most flattering terms of you and Gov. Dunn,12Oscar James Dunn (1826–71) was the first African American elected lieutenant governor in the United States, serving in that capacity in Louisiana from 1868 until his untimely death in late November 1871. Dunn was born in New Orleans to a free woman of mixed race who managed a boardinghouse that catered to entertainers. In 1841, while apprenticed to a painter and plasterer, Dunn ran away from home and began working on steamboats traveling up and down the Mississippi River, first as a barber and later as a successful musician-singer. After the Civil War, he spent several years working for the Freedmen’s Bureau in New Orleans, managing an employment service that negotiated contracts between former slaves and their former masters. Dunn gained a reputation for honesty in his work, and was easily elected lieutenant governor on the Republican ticket in 1868. Initially, his relationship with the governor, Henry Clay Warmoth, seems to have been cordial, but by 1870 it was growing strained, since Dunn considered Warmoth too eager to welcome unreconstructed politicians back into the state’s political life and insufficiently concerned with safeguarding African Americans’ rights. In early 1871, Dunn assumed the duties of acting governor while Warmoth left the state to seek treatment for a foot injury. In August, Dunn was selected by the delegates to preside over the Republican State Convention, instead of the governor. Infuriated by the slight, Warmoth hurried back to New Orleans and pulled his supporters from the floor of the convention and set up one of his own in a nearby building. Warmoth accused Dunn of attempting to “Africanize” Louisiana, while the delegates meeting at the official Republican convention, presided over by Dunn, voted to expel Warmoth from the Republican party and called for his impeachment. Dunn fell ill in the middle of the political crisis (rumors spread that he had been poisoned) and died in November, before the crisis was fully resolved. Emily Suzanne Clark, A Luminous Brotherhood: Afro-Creole Spiritualism in Nineteenth Century New Orleans (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2016), 64–65; Philip Dray, Capitol Men: The Epic Story of Reconstruction through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen (New York, 2008), 111–18. leaving Langston entirely out of his remarks. Langston at that point left the gallery. He is not leaving a stone unturned to cripple the paper, and your popularity.13Whatever negative opinions Langston may have held about the New National Era at the time Charles Douglass wrote this letter, little evidence suggests that he expressed them in public. Moreover, Langston’s activities during January 1872 in support of the supplementary civil rights bill and other civic matters received generally favorable coverage in the local newspapers, including the New National Era. Alexandria (Va.) Daily State Journal, 11, 13 January 1872; NNE, 28 December 1871, 11, 13, 18 January 1872. The latter he can never do. People will begin to ask who is this man Langston? what has he sacrificed for the cause of his race? is he more than an ordinary stump speaker? Is he a a success at his profession? All these questions will have to be answered affirmatively and satisfactorily before he can ever succeed in injuring you before thinking people. I have no fears of it; but I do despise the man for making the attempt. He dare not over his own signature publish one thing against you. I had great respect for him once, but can never have again, he is too much a coward. I will be glad when you have finished your tour. I know you are having it rough enough. This time a year ago we were on the ocean. You
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saw many rough as well as pleasant times, now you are at it again. I hope you will make this your last winter of travelling.
All my family are well. I have killed and smoked my hogs, over 300 weight. The weather is beautiful, resembling spring time. I never hear from mother,14Anna Murray Douglass. though I have written. That Howard boy15Possibly the William E. Howard (c. 1844) who enlisted in Boston, Massachusetts, on 30 June 1864, joining Company I of the Fifth Massachusetts Colored Cavalry. Born in Hamilton, Canada, he apparently was living in Rochester, New York, at the time he enlisted, and was a shoemaker by trade. Howard may be the mixed-race six-year-old who is recorded in the 1850 Census as living in the household of the elderly couple Archibald and Elisabeth Gaul, with parents James (a waiter) and Elisabeth Howard. His military records indicate that he received a $325 bonus upon enlisting. They also indicate that he was first listed as absent without leave on 1 April 1865, near City Point, Virginia, and declared a deserter on or around 1 May, after being arrested in Richmond, Virginia. He seems to have spent some time incarcerated but was mustered out in Texas on 31 October 1865. He may be the William E. Howard who died in September 1877 and was buried in Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, New York. 1850 U.S. Census, New York, Monroe County, 174; “U.S., Colored Troops Military Service Records, 1863–1865,” Ancestry.com; Find a Grave (online). was in my company in the 5th Cavalry. He came to the Regt. as a substitute, and asked to go in my Co. I had to tie him up by the thumbs quite often. His offense was stealing.
Mr. Loguen16Jermain Wesley Loguen. is here—
All join in love
Aff. Yr. son
CHAS. R. DOUGLASS
ALS: General Correspondence File, reel 2, frames 623–25, FD Papers, DLC.
