[Letter to] My Dear Friend
Contributors: Chapman, Maria Weston, 1806-1885, recipient
Series: Maria Weston Chapman Correspondence (1835-1885)
Published: 1843
Place of publication: Cambridge, Indiana
Language: eng
Format: [manuscript]
Subjects: Correspondence; Women abolitionists; Antislavery movements; History
Notes: Holograph, signed.

Frederick Douglass wants to make his position clear in regard to the incident at Syracuse. Conflicting notices were given of a "property convention" and of an anti-slavery meeting for the same afternoon. The next day, before the adjournment of the morning session, Douglass announced the afternoon anti-slavery meeting. Whereupon John A. Collins announced a property meeting and made a speech, referring to the "bigotry and narrowmindedness abolitionists," etc. Charles L. Remond replied, expressing "the belief that the Board of Managers could not sanction him [Collins] as their general agent." Then Collins read documents complimentary to himself, and presented four propositions, which Frederick Douglass quotes to the effect that the universal reform movement will benefit the slave more than the anti-slavery movement alone. In the afternoon meeting, Frederick Douglass posed the question of "whether it was just or honorable for Mr. Collins to labor in the one [cause] for the distruction [sic] of the other." And closed by saying that if the Board sanctioned Mr. Collins's course, Douglass felt it was his duty to resign his agency for carrying out the plan of the hundred conventions.

In the postscript, Frederick Douglass asks Maria Weston Chapman to provide his wife with $25 or $30.