Frederick Douglass to John H. Hawes, July 1869

FREDERICK DOUGLASS TO JOHN H. HAWES^{1John H. Hawes (?–c. 1875) was listed as the business manager on the masthead of the early 1870s issues of the New Era. Born in New York, Hawes moved to Iowa and edited the Lyons Mirror before being appointed the principal clerk of surveys in the Department of the Interior in 1861 by Abraham Lincoln. Hawes wrote a manual on surveying for the U.S. General Land Office. He resigned when Andrew Johnson became president. He then began working with the Union League to organize loyal Republican elements in the southern states. In 1868, Hawes supported Grant’s election by editing a campaign newspaper, the National Radical. In 1871 he was appointed U.S. consul in Hakodadi, Japan, where he died. Des Moines (Iowa) Register, 22 November 1871; New York Times, 7 December 1871; 1870 U.S. Census, District of Columbia, Washington, 361B; Register of Officers and Agents, Civil. Military, and Naval, in the Service of the United States . . . 1865 (Washington, D.C., 1866), 124; J. H. Hawes, System of Rectangular Surveying Employed in Subdividing the Public Lands of the United States (1868; Philadelphia, 1882); C. Albert White, A History of the Rectangular Survey System (Washington, D.C., n.d.), 144; Papers Related to the Foreign Relations of the United States . . . 1875 (Washington, D.C., 1875), 2: 806–07; Patrick B. Wolfe, Wolfe’s History of Clinton County, Iowa, 2 vols. (Indianapolis, Ind., 1911), 240.}

[n.p. July 1869.]

J. H HAWES:

MY DEAR SIR.

I have duly received your letter of July 8th and have considered its contents. Candour is due to all men, and especially to those who are themselves candid. I am greatly obliged to you for the unvarnished story you relate in your letter, of the past and present condition of the “New Era”^{2While the specifics of Hawes’s warning to Douglass have been lost, there was considerable evidence publicly available in the midsummer of 1870 of the failing health of the New Era. Many of the original shareholders had abandoned the newspaper, its editor J. Sella Martin had resigned, and creditors had seized its type and press. Despite its poor condition, Douglass moved to Washington in late August and purchased a half-ownership stake in the Era in an attempt to save it. Foner, Life and Writings, 4: 57.} and in view of that story I am entirely convinced that I ought it would be wholly unwise for me to connect my self with it in the several ways you propose. I have no such faith in my ability to put life and prosperity into an enterprise which is according to your own statement, “already so near death. The very parties to whom you refer as having already <[illegible]> hampered the enterprise would exert themselves anew to destroy it if I should be elevated to its editorial management and their past relations to the paper give them power to injure it.

I should be very willing to make any reasonable sacrifices in order to the establishment of a powerful paper at Washington but it would be quite unreasonable for me, at my time of life, to give up a certainty for an uncertainty in the matter of making a livelihood. By lecturing I make five or six thousand dollars a year.^{3Douglass maintained prodigious lecturing schedules in the winter seasons of the late 1860s. The former abolitionist James Redpath, who ran the nation’s leading agency for booking lectures, confirmed that Douglass was the only African American who consistently drew large audiences across the North, usually commanding fees between $50 and $125 a performance. John R. McKivigan, Forgotten Firebrand: James Redpath and the Making of Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca, N.Y., 2008), 121–22; Blight, Prophet of Freedom, 497, 527; Angela G. Ray, “Frederick Douglass on the Lyceum Circuit: Social Assimilation, Social Transformation?” Rhetoric and Public Affairs, 5: 627–28 (Winter 2002).} Of course, if I should take hold of the paper, I should abandon my lecturing vocation except upon rare occasions[.] I should have to look to the paper for my entire support as I should certainly give to it my entire time and strength. You will easily see that, I could not be just to myself and to those dependent upon me, if I gave up my present occupation, without the positive guarantee, of an equivalent income from some other source.

Yours Truly

FREDK DOUGLASS

ALS: General Correspondence File, reel 9, frames 71–72, FD Papers, DLC.