Harriet H. Greenhough to Frederick Douglass, June 3, 1874

HARRIET H. GREENOUGH^{1Harriet Howard Fay Greenough (1810–85) apparently became a friend of Frederick Douglass while both were living in Rochester, New York. Born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, she married a New York City merchant named William Henry Greenough (1796–1853) in 1831. By 1850, they were living in Rochester, where Frederick and Anna Douglass lived from 1848 to 1873. Harriet was likely a member of the Rochester Ladies Anti-Slavery Society, which held fund-raising events to provide support to the two newspapers that Douglass edited while in Rochester, the North Star and Frederick Douglass’ Paper. After her husband died in 1853, Harriet lived the rest of her life with or near family members in Cambridge, Massachusetts. New York Evening Post, 2 December 1853; 1850 U.S. Census, New York, Monroe County, 308B; 1860 U.S. Census, Massachusetts, Middlesex County, 60; 1870 U.S. Census, Massachusetts, Middlesex County, 465B; “U.S., City Directories, 1822–1995”; 1880 U.S. Census, Massachusetts, Middlesex County, 251C; Find a Grave (online); O’Keefe, Frederick and Anna Douglass, 31, 40, 47, 54, 56, 57, 59, 63; EAAH, 3: 57–58.} TO FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Cambridge[, Mass.] 3 June [1874.]

FREDERICK DOUGLAS ESQ

316 A. N. E. ST—

MY DEAR FRIEND

Through your friend Mrs Mosher,^{2In May 1886, Angeline “Angie” Judd McKay Mosher (1837–c. 1900) hosted a breakfast for Douglass that was attended by many notables in Cambridge, Massachusetts, shortly before he departed for a European tour with his wife, Helen Pitts Douglass. Mosher was born in Warsaw, New York, where her father, Ferdinand Cecil Dwight McKay, was a successful attorney and businessman. The family was active in the temperance and abolitionist movements. In 1860, McKay moved his family to Des Moines, Iowa, where Angeline McKay married Charles Mosher in 1856. Following her husband’s death in 1869, Mosher returned to the East Coast and eventually settled in Cambridge with her three daughters. In the late 1890s, Mosher published magazine articles and often addressed women’s clubs on topics related to the history of Brittany. 1850 U.S. Census, New York, Wyoming County, 319A; 1880 U.S. Census, Massachusetts, Middlesex County, 19; New York Christian Union 33: 6 (27 May 1886); (Springfield, Mass.) New England Stationer and Printer, 11: 17 (September 1897); Cambridge (Mass.) Chronicles, 9 April 1898; Old Anti-Slavery Days: Proceedings of the Commemorative Meeting Held by the Danvers Historical Society, at the Town Hall, Danvers, April 26, 1893 (Danvers, Mass., 1893), 139; James Adolphus McKay, Genealogy of the McKay Family, Descendants from Elkenny McKay, the founder of the Family in America . . . (West Superior, Wisc., 1896), 57–59; Find a Grave (online).} I hear that you are in present affliction thru’ the bank of which you had accepted the Presidency unconscious of its unstable condition^{3Greenough refers to the financial problems of the Freedmen’s Savings and Trust Bank, which Douglass had become president of on 1 April 1874. Despite his efforts to save that institution, it officially closed on 2 July of that year. Osthaus, Freedmen, Philanthropy, and Fraud, 183–86, 198–99.} —

I feel a very sincere sympathy for you in a trial of this sort as I know that your sensibilities will be wounded undeservedly in many ways and that for a time you will be more or less helpless in your resistance to an evil so new to your experience—

If it were in my power to offer the kind of help you need in an emergency of this kind, I should feel less hesitation in writing to you of so barren a sympathy as mine—but I trust to your generous nature, to appreciate my better motive which is to assure you of my confidence in your ability—to bring to your work even in this direction <and one> so new to you, the same integrity of purpose, clearness of perception and intellectual ability that has sustained you in far more arduous endeavours—

There probably was never a time when embarrassments of a pecuniary character would have pressed more heavily upon the energies of all persons connected with business of any kind, but I cannot but hope that the limit of embarrassment will have been reached and that with the glorious harvest of which we have the promise in this favored country will provide the ways and means of escape from present stagnation in many of the most important industries of the country and that many of the broken institutions will revive and the struggling ones recover their lost ground—Hoping that you will be among the first to feel the good effects of every change for the better and that the honorable position offered to you, and taken in good faith, will afford to you another opportunity to triumph over difficulties for which you were unprepared, believe me always your friend and advocate—

HARRIET H GREENOUGH

P.S. at Mrs. Mosher’s suggestion I wrote to you of a little circumstance which she thought would interest you—but as I had not your direction she thinks may not have reached you

One evening, I was reading to the children of my daughter Mrs Hamilton^{4Annie Lillie Greenough (1842–1928) was the sixth of seven children born to William H. and Harriet H. Greenough. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she gave evidence of an exceptional singing voice early in her life, and at age fifteen began lessons in London. Two years later, she married Charles Moulton (1838–71), the son of an American banker who resided in Paris. Throughout the 1860s, the couple were guests at the court of Napoleon III, where Lillie often performed. With the fall of the Second Empire in 1870, they moved to the United States; Charles died soon after. In 1875, Lillie married Johan Henrik de Hegermann-Lindencrone (1838–1918), a Danish diplomat stationed in Washington, D.C. He was subsequently posted to Rome, Stockholm, Paris, and Berlin over the next four decades, and so the couple became acquainted with nearly every significant European and American political and cultural figure of the era. Lillie recounted her experiences in elite society in two books, In the Courts of Memory, 1858–1877 (1912), and The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875–1912 (1914), which drew heavily on her correspondence with family members. Lillie died in Copenhagen, Denmark, on 17 March 1928. The daughter referred to in this letter is either Lillie Suzanne Moulton (1864–1946) or Nina Moulton (1870–1946). “Massachusetts, Town and Vital Records, 1620–1988,” Ancestry.com; “U.S., Passport Applications, 1795–1925”; “Massachusetts, Marriage Records, 1840–1915, Ancestry.com; Lillie de Hegermann-Lindencrone, In the Courts of Memory, 1858–1875: From Contemporary Letters (New York, 1912), vii–viii; Lillie de HegermannLindencrone, The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875–1912 (New York, 1914), vii.} as is my habit, after <before> they [illegible] <go to> sleep for the night—

Among the pieces selected was the story of your childhood as written by yourself—after closing the book, I found the little girl weeping under the bedclothes bitterly—It was some time before I could learn what sorrow had so convulsed her that she could not speak. After a time of continued soothing, she confessed that she felt that she had [illegible] very rude to you, the evening you took tea with us, and she thought she could never forgive herself nor be forgiven—I did not ask in what way she had rude to you, because she was so much agitated, but I told her that should I ever see you, I would ask for her, your forgiveness—this comforted her a little, but she sobbed herself to sleep—under the conviction that perhaps she might have added by some thoughtless word or action to the trials of feeling to which your sorrowful life had felt been effused—True to my promise, I ask for her, your forgiveness, knowing that in all probability, I shall not see you as I then hoped, in Washington—as I could not go on the charitable mission which took Mrs Hamilton there, I have thus placed on record, the effect of your touching story upon the susceptible heart of this young child, who sorrows still, like by some unaccountable impulse. She had wounded the sensibility of which she first gained knowledge by the expression of your gratitude to your grandmother and of your love for her

I write in haste, but I thought with Mrs Mosher, to whom I mentioned the incident that I ought to withhold from you, the knowledge, of which perhaps you had as little conception as I had of her feelings, that you could so stir the young soul into a recognition of its duties and susceptibilities by you made of narrating duly the solemn truths they unfolded—

I hope I have not wounded you by this bitter incident, but that as hitherto, you will excuse me if I appear devoid of the sympathy I have always felt for you—

Truly yours—

HARRIET H GREENOUGH

ALS: General Correspondence File, reel 9, frames 47–50, FD Papers, DLC.

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