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RUSSELL LANT CARPENTER TO FREDERICK DOUGLASS
Bristol, [Eng.] 5 March 1868.
MY DEAR MR DOUGLASS,
I am very sorry to find that our letters have failed to reach you. It is probable that they have been mislaid, while you were on your journey; as was the case with one containing a remittance from Halifax, some years ago, which was afterwards found.
I have not written for some time in the Inquirer, on American affairs; partly because I had to avoid unnecessary work, for th but also because I hardly know what to say. Since Christmas, the Editor1Between 1855 and 1888, the Reverend Thomas Lethbridge Marshall (1825–1915) edited the Inquirer. Marshall also was the minister at London’s Stamford Street Chapel. As editor, he tried to mediate between the frequent doctrinal feuds between scripturally rooted Unitarians and others who looked to nature and other nonsupernatural sources. The Unitarian: A Monthly Magazine of Liberal Christianity (May 1888) 3: 234; John Stevens, Keshab: Bengal’s Forgotten Prophet (Oxford, Eng, 2018), 48–49. of the Inqr.2The Inquirer is a Nonconformist, Unitarian Christian newspaper. Founded by Edward Hill, it was first published on 9 July 1842. Religious ministers from both sides of the Atlantic contributed articles, many of them antislavery in nature. The Inquirer is still published every fortnight. has sent me the Antislavery Standard,3The National Anti-Slavery Standard, published in New York City from 11 June 1840 to December 1872, was the official organ of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Early editors included Lydia Maria Child, Sydney Howard Gay, and Maria Weston Chapman. Oliver Johnson and Edmund Quincy, editors during the Civil War, resigned when Wendell Phillips replaced William Lloyd Garrison as president of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Parker Pillsbury assumed the editorship and supported Phillips’s position that abolitionists should continue to work for the full rights of the freedmen. John W. Blassingame, ed., Antislavery Newspapers and Periodicals, 5 vols. (Boston, 1980–84), 4: 7–8; McPherson, Struggle for Equality, 305, 368, 428. and it informs my connection—that the friends of true freedom have still a great work before them. I expected a reaction after the completion of the war. After the passing of our first Reform bill,4In March 1831 the prominent Whig Lord John Russell introduced a wide-ranging parliamentary reform bill. The bill, which became law in July 1832, heralded a new series of Whig reforms, including the abolition of slavery and a Factory Act that alleviated harsh working conditions and child labor. Despite these successes, the Whig party steadily unraveled in the late 1830s, mainly by splitting into smaller factions. This process culminated in the 1859 alliance between Whigs, radicals, and former Peelites under the leadership of the former foreign secretary Lord Henry John Temple Palmerston, a union that marked the foundation of the modern Liberal party. Juliet Gardiner and Neil Wenborn, eds., The Columbia Companion to British History (New York, 1997), 804–05; Sally Mitchell, ed., Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia (New York, 1988), 856–58. and the first enthusiasm which for a time it awakened, there was such a reaction; still we are making progress in many ways, and so I have no doubt you are, in the U.S.; not-withstanding many rebuffs and discouragements. When I was in the U.S., some 18 years ago,5Carpenter visited the United States in 1850 and traveled (by his count) roughly 13,000 miles through New York, Washington, D.C., Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Ohio. He stopped at Rochester, but Douglass was not home; instead, Anna invited him to tea, and Carpenter wrote that there was “much to converse about.” By chance, he met Douglass on a train in New England; Douglass, according to Carpenter, was “afraid lest his English friends should be set against him by his desire to occupy a position independent of the Garrisonians.” Douglass also regretted that Carpenter “could not employ that unqualified denunciation of slaveholders . . . but he knew my views on this point” when he stayed with the family in Bridgwater in 1846. Carpenter published a book about his travels, Observations on American Slavery after a Year’s Tour in the United States (London, 1852). Russell Lant Carpenter to Samuel May, 14 February 1850, digitalcommonwealth.org. I cheered my antislavery friends by saying that in England we are accustomed to colossal defeats; but also accustomed to expect final success. When I remember the way in which Catholics & Dissenters were injured and insulted by law in my boyish days, and the great isolation between rich and poor, I know rejoice in the great progress I have witnessed, though still we are very far indeed from what we desire.
The North has made remarkable progress; though no doubt the scorn and contempt toward the negro is still too prevalent, and justifies the South in refusing to believe in the sincerity of the North, in its legislation for the South.
I suppose that there is great diversity in the condition of the freedmen in the South. We hear a great deal of their measures, but I hope that there are large classes who, like the people of the Sea Islands,6Carpenter alludes to the widely reported activities of the Union army, agents of freedmen aid societies, and northern missionaries who worked with the slave population on the coastal islands of South Carolina and Georgia. As the Union military began amphibious operations to secure control of this area in 1862 and 1863, most planters fled, and their slaves, numbering around ten thousand, experienced de facto emancipation. Some tension occurred as African Americans sought to assert their autonomy on small farm plots, whereas federal officials desired to restore the plantations to productivity. Programs to educate the black population were generally well received, and religious and secular groups dispatched teachers to the sea islands. Andrew Johnson’s policy of pardoning former Confederates and then restoring their land to them wiped out some economic progress made by freedpeople, but the Freedmen’s Bureau helped the northern philanthropists continue their educational work in the region. Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal ExperimentObservations on American Slavery after a Year’s Tour in the United States (Indianapolis, Ind., 1964), 39–40, 154, 310, 332–56; Kevin Dougherty, The Port Royal Experiment: A Case Study in Development (Jackson, Miss., 2014), 8–17, 40–51, 56–57, 110–17. are far better off than they were in the old days. I have no fear that they will sink to the condition of the worst class in the West Indies, because there is far more stimulus to exertion in the U.S. and more interest will be taken in them.
I am very glad to see the zeal of some of our Northern friends for the Freedmen’s Schools. We have been called on to do something to help, in the establishment of Normal Schools, for negro teachers in the South, which seemed a good object, though what I propose is such institutions as the Oberlin College, Ohio,7Located in the northeastern Ohio community of the same name, Oberlin College was founded in 1833 by New School Presbyterians and Congregationalists to help spread their evangelical theology into the West. Presided over initially by the progressive ministers Asa Mahan and then Charles G. Finney, Oberlin was the nation’s first college to admit African Americans (in 1835) and the first to admit women (in 1837). Robert Samuel Fletcher, A History of Oberlin College: From Its Foundation through the Civil War, 2 vols. (New York, 1971), 120, 170–81, 191–92, 373–85. where persons incur a good education without
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distinction of colour or sex. It is no doubt of the first importance to have a number of well educated negro gentlemen, scattered thru the South, who will be something more than mere teachers of children, as they may be leaders among their brethren in various ways.
Our Unitarian friends in New England are helping one of the Methodist (Coloured) Churches: These good men no doubt differ from us in doctrine; but they do not seem much afraid of a denomination which has shown itself (of late at least) so desirous to elevate & instruct their people.8Carpenter’s appraisal of the freedpeople’s response to Unitarianism probably was influenced by reports sent by South Carolina missionaries such as William Channing Gannett and Joseph W. Parker, who found emotional (rather than intellectual) preaching most effective in reaching former slaves. Carpenter notes that the southern wing of the Methodist Episcopal Church had staunchly defended slavery and was slow to adjust to the emancipated slaves’ new status. Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction, 74–75, 90, 92, 365; John R. McKivigan, The War against Proslavery Religion: Abolitionism and the Northern Churches, 1830–1865 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1984), 170–71, 187. They will preach what they think the truth, but they are quite ready to diffuse the tracts of our Aso Association. I see that there has been quite a schism in our church at Washington, because some are demanding that the building should be used for a coloured school.9The First Unitarian Church of Washington, D.C., founded in 1820, numbered many prominent political leaders among its members in the antebellum era. During the Civil War, the church building was taken over by the federal government and operated as a hospital, which left the congregation, in the words of one scholar, “exhausted, divided, and scattered.” From 1865 to 1877, it lacked a permanent minster and had to make do with a series of “temporary supplies.” One of these was the Reverend William Sharman, a visiting Unitarian minister from England, who led the church from 1868 to 1870. Sharman was a disciple of the social reformer William Morris, and when he returned home worked for the causes of laborers. During this period, a schism led to two congregations meeting separately, for reasons not clear. A reconciliation was achieved in 1877. Boston Christian Register, 91: 403–04 (25 April 1912); Jennie W. Scudder, A Century of Unitarianism in the National Capital, 1821–1921 (Boston, 1922), 72–77. At Baltimore, Mr Ware10A third-generation Unitarian minister, John F. W. Ware (1818–81) graduated from Harvard University and then Harvard Divinity School. After serving churches in Fall River and Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, he preached in Baltimore from 1865 to 1872. Ware then returned to Massachusetts to a pastorate at the Arlington Street Unitarian Church in Boston until his death. A strong antislavery voice, Ware frequently visited army camps and hospitals during the war and was thereafter a popular Memorial Day orator. He also was a prolific author of Unitarian tracts and published a short memoir, Home Life, in 1867. Ware’s racial views were not as enlightened as Carpenter implies; he warned white Baltimoreans that they should educate the freedpeople or else “the horde of ignorant, unrestrained men, women, and children will be upon you—your city will be the charnel house of vagabondism, vice, and crime.” New York Times, 28 February 1881; The Year-Book of the Unitarian Congregation Churches, for 1867 (Boston, 1867), 67; Richard Paul Fuke, Imperfect Equality: African Americans and the Confines of White Racial Attitudes in Post-Emancipation Maryland (New York, 1999), 233. seems to fraternize very well with the coloured people.
Do you ever write for the papers? If you are too busy to send us a letter, please, now and then, do send us some of your published letters, or speeches but your letters are especially welcome, and I am very glad that you so kindly & warmly cherish our friendship.
Is Mr Montgomery11Born in Portland, Cumberland County, Maine, George Washington Montgomery (1810–98) organized the First Universalist Society in Rochester in 1845 and presided there until 1853. Montgomery’s Illustrations of the Law of Kindness was first published in 1841 and reprinted in three more editions. Peck, History of Rochester and Monroe County, 1: 334. still the Universalist minister at Rochester? He wrote an excellent little book some 25 years ago—“The Laws of Kindness.” Is he kind to your people? I have read with great interest Mr. S. J. Mays12Samuel Joseph May (1797–1871) mixed abolitionism with other humanitarian concerns during his long career as a Unitarian clergyman. Boston-born and Harvard-educated, May studied theology at Harvard Divinity School and was ordained in 1822. In the course of his forty-year ministry, he championed such causes as temperance, women’s rights, pacifism, universal education, and abolitionism. Originally a supporter of African colonization, May joined the abolitionist ranks in 1830, supported Prudence Crandall’s efforts to establish a school for black youths in 1833, and enjoyed a long tenure as an agent of the New England Anti-Slavery Society. During the 1840s and 1850s he aided many fugitive slaves in reaching Canada and helped rescue Jerry McHenry from slave catchers in Syracuse, New York, in 1851. After the Civil War, he worked with black colleagues such as Jermain W. Loguen and Douglass to fight racial segregation in New York schools. Carpenter alludes to May’s Discourse on Slavery in the United States (1831) and his autobiographical articles originally published in the Boston Christian Recorder in 1867 and 1868 and later collected in his Some Recollections of Our Antislavery Conflict (Boston, 1869). Donald Yacovone, Samuel Joseph May and the Dilemmas of the Liberal Persuasion, 1797–1871 (Philadelphia, 1991); Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease, Bound with Them in Chains: A Biographical History of the Antislavery Movement (Westport, Conn., 1972), 276–307; NCAB, 2: 313; DAB, 12: 447–48. [illegible] discourse, and his antislavery recollections.
Ever faithfully yours
RUSSELL L. CARPENTER.
[P.S.] I have been writing while my baby nephew13In all likelihood this is a reference to Herbert William Russell Thomas (1867–1960), the youngest surviving child of Carpenter’s brother and sister-in-law, Charles and Lucy Browne Thomas. By 1891, Thomas was a successful soap manufacturer, married to a well-connected member of the Anglo-Irish gentry, Kate Lucy Thompson, and living in Westbury-on-Trym, Gloucestershire, England. In 1901 he served as one of the justices of the peace for Gloucestershire. From at least 1911 through 1928, Thomas resided in Thornbury, also in Gloucestershire, where he owned and operated an even more successful soap and candle manufacturing business. “England and Wales, Civil Registration Death Index, 1916–2007,” Ancestry.com; “England and Wales, National Probate Calendar, 1858–1960,” Ancestry.com; “England and Wales, Non-Conformist Record Indexes, 1588–1977”; “1891 England and Wales Census”; “1901 England and Wales Census”; “1911 England and Wales Census”; Wright, Ussher Memoirs, 204; Rose, Cyclopaedia of Canadian Biography, 2: 19–23. has been playing in the room, so excuse a dull note.
ALS: General Correspondence File, reel 2, frames 349–52, FD Papers, DL.
