[Letter to] Dear Mr. Garrison
Contributors: Garrison, Francis Jackson, 1848-1916, recipient
Series: Maria Weston Chapman Correspondence (1835-1885)
Published: 1881
Place of publication: Weymouth, [Mass.]
Language: eng
Format: [manuscript]
Subjects: Correspondence; Boston Female Anti-slavery Society; Right and wrong in Boston; Women abolitionists; Antislavery movements; History
Notes: Holograph.

Maria Weston Chapman is sending this letter in response to a letter she recieved from [Francis Jackson] Garrison. She gives the dates of the publication of "Right and Wrong in Boston." No. 1 is "a concise statement of events previous & subsequent to the annual meeting of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society" with the motto from Fenelon: "Si je vous parle fortement, n'en soyez pas etonne; c'est que la verite est libre et forte." She explains the delayed publication date, due to the reluctance of the booksellers. When Francis J. Garrison finds a copy of this number, Maria Chapman will "thrust in a few notes, -- not needed at the time; but now, by years, made necessary." She explains the background of No. 1; society, state, and church all being in bonds of slavery, it seemed "needful to begin first with Society ...& this was the aim of No. 1." She recollects the misgivings of Mr. [Amos Augustus] Phelps and Mary S. Parker, and the final adoption of the publication plan by the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society. Harriet Martineau "passed through the skirts of the mob--unaware of its nature at the time" [1835]. Chapman wrote: "The members of Dr. Channing's congregation were the mob." She tells an anecdote of a Mr. Rhodes, who kept a hat store near the scene of the mob, saying that in thirty years he had never seen so many good hats before.