3

(Campbell) was proud to belong? Where will you find a truer advocate of
the cause than “The True Wesleyan,[”]^{12Based in New York City, the True Wesleyan was the official organ of the small abolitionist ‘“comeouter” sect of the Wesleyan Methodist Connection, which was launched in 1843. McKivigan, War against Proslavery Religion, 85, 86, 131; Sernet, North Star Country, 83.} The N. Y. Independent^{13The Independent (1848–1928) was a weekly newspaper published in New York. Originally a religious newspaper, the Independent was dedicated to the survival of the Congregationalist Church after several Presbyterian and Congregationalist leaders adopted a “Plan of Union” for missionary labors in the western territories. In 1854 the Independent’s format was changed in an attempt to broaden the newspaper’s appeal to non-Congregationalist readers. Theodore Tilton, who joined the newspaper in 1854, placed a stronger emphasis on antislavery, temperance, and woman suffrage. The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, an early contributor, served as editor from 1861 until 1863, when Tilton became editor in chief. In 1867, Tilton changed the Independent’s format to a weekly political magazine, and the religious emphasis was slowly abandoned. Tilton recruited Douglass to write the article “The Work Before Us” for the Independent in 1868. The magazine absorbed a rival, Harper’s Weekly, in 1916. In 1921 the Independent merged with the Weekly Review and later with the Outlook, forming the Outlook and Independent in 1928. That final incarnation folded in 1932. Lib., 8 December 1848; New York Independent, 27 August 1868; New York Times, 23 April 1916, 21 September 1921, 29 June 1932; Louis Filler, “Liberalism, Anti-Slavery, and the Founders of the Independent,” NEQ, 27:291–306 (September 1954).}
or Fred. Douglass’ Paper? (applause) The aforesaid R. Purvis could endure this heresy no longer. He raved and tore and broke things generally, and particularly did he break vocem suam^{14Latin for “his voice.”} into sundry yells and very high notes. It was not enough for him to abuse generally everybody who sympathized with Gerrit Smith’s views, but as is his wont he had to come down to low epithets and personalties, “He said Frederick Douglass had been born a miserable suppliant slave, and he had not yet out-grown all the essential of the crawling servile, it was embedded in his bones. We did not cast him off because he changed his views, but because WE believed him to be an unprincipled man. It is a libel on us; if uttered as it must have been, with a knowledge of the fact, it was a bare lie! [A]nd there was but one word which befitted its utterer, and that is, he is a liar! A black man standing for the Constitution, indeed! It was dishonesty on its very face. We have labored to very little purpose, if there were still left black men who are so detestably mean as to claim the Constitution for Freedom?” (that is to say it is a mean, cowardly piece of business for any body to differ with us, but for black men to do so, that I shan’t allow.)—Here Robert stopped for breath. In fact we believe he gave this as an excuse for stopping his classically chaste remarks. We cannot help remarking that Robert blazed from first to last without the least fraction of applause.

The sharp vetran and tried warrior Dr. Bias^{15 James J. Gould Bias.} here tried to get the floor, if he obtained which he would have excoriated this Purvis most thoroughly.

Mr. Robert Douglass^{16Probably Robert M. J. Douglass, Jr. (1809–87), son of a British West Indies immigrant to Philadelphia who became a successful hairdresser and leader of that city’s black community. His sister was Sarah Mapps Douglass, an abolitionist and educator. A talented portrait painter, the younger Douglass became active in abolitionism in the 1830s. He visited Haiti and reported positively on conditions there. In the 1850s he was a proponent of immigration to Africa. Julie Winch, Philadelphia’s Black Elite: Activism, Accommodation, and the Struggle for Autonomy, 1787–1848 (Philadelphia, 1988), 5, 35, 50, 61, 83, 94, 129; Merrill and Ruchames, Garrison Letters, 3:60.} said he came last year to the Convention in accordance with the general invitation extended and found Spiritualists,^{17Following the highly publicized claims in 1848 of Margaret and Kate Fox, two sisters from Rochester, New York, to be able to contact the spirits of the deceased via a system of audible “‘rappings,” belief in the powers of mediums to communicate with the dead became widespread across the United States. Andrew Jackson Davis, a prominent medium, worked hard to connect Spiritualism with the abolitionist, temperance, and women’s rights movements of the 1850s. Most abolitionists remained skeptical, but a few, such as the Boston minister John Pierpont and Douglass’s Garrisonian friends Amy and Isaac Post, became staunch believers in Spiritualism. Ronald G. Walters, American Reformers, 1815–1860 (New York, 1978), 163–71; Bret E. Carroll, Spiritualism in Antebellum America (Bloomington, Ind., 1997), 3–4, 248.} Colonizationists and others allowed to speak, and he took occasion to make some remarks himself. For this he and his eloquent friend, (Dr. Bias) had been villified in The Standard,^{18New York National Anti-Slavery Standard.} and he mentioned it now in order that the leading members of the Society might have an oppertunity to disclaim sympathy with the course of The Standard.

‘Brother Purvis’ was again on hand playing on his favorite harp, Frederick Douglass. De Wolf interposed, and asked what Mr. Douglass had done to merit such obloquy? Brother Purvis, said he had abused George Thomson, and doing so he has shown himself meanly base and cowardly unprincipled. He then proceeded to say “It is a lie, and the utterer is a liar four or 5 times to De Wolf whom he knew to be non-resistant. De Wolf asked to make an explanation; but ‘Brother Purvis,’ replied that a base