Ohio History Journal

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NOTES

NOTES

 

BRILLIANT THOUGHTS AND IMPORTANT TRUTHS:

A SPEECH OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS

 

1. For information about Douglass see Benjamin Quarles, Frederick Douglass (Wash-

ington, 1948), and the same author's "Abolition's Different Drummer: Frederick Doug-

lass," in Martin Duberman, ed., The Antislavery Vanguard (Princeton, N. J., 1965),

123-134. See also the invaluable Philip S. Foner, The Life and Writings of Frederick

Douglass (New York, 1950-55).

2. The speech was published in the Wilmington, Ohio Herald of Freedom, May 7, 1852.

3. Apparently Douglass realized that one of the inevitable results of the industrial and

communication revolutions was to be the end of slavery. For a discussion of historians'

neglect of this factor, consult James C. Malin, The Contriving Brain and the Skillful

Hand in the United States (Lawrence, Kan., 1955), 192-196.

4. The nomination of Zachary Taylor for the presidency in 1848 placed the antislavery

Whigs in a difficult position. Taylor was a slaveholder and the hero of the Mexican War,

which the abolitionists viewed as a war for the expansion of slavery.

5. Daniel Sharp (1783-1853), Baptist; Gardiner Spring (1785-1872), Presbyterian:

Jesse Ames Spencer (1816-1898), Episcopalian; Nathan Lord (1792-1870) and Orville

Dewey (1794-1882), Unitarians.

6. With his conversion to political abolitionism, Douglass became convinced that the

Constitution was potentially a strong weapon against slavery. Just before leaving for

Cincinnati he told Gerrit Smith of the need to oppose the nonvoting theory at the con-

vention. "Men should not, under the guidance of a false philosophy, be led to fling from

them such powerful instrumentalities against Slavery as the Constitution and the ballot,"

he wrote. Douglass to Gerrit Smith, April 15, 1852, in Foner, Frederick Douglass, II, 177.

7. Many Americans sympathized with those in both countries who were fighting for

national self-determination.

8. Daniel O'Connell (1775-1847), Irish national leader and reformer who also espoused

the cause of abolition.

9. Lajos Kossuth (1802-1894), Hungarian patriot and leader of the unsuccessful na-

tional revolt of 1849. He disappointed American abolitionists because of his avoidance of

the slavery issue in order to get maximum support for the cause of Hungarian independ-

ence.

 

CINCINNATI: ATHENS OF THE WEST, 1830-1861

This paper is based upon a wide variety of primary and secondary sources housed in

The Cincinnati Historical Society and a paper read at the OAH 1966 Cincinnati meeting.

1. Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans, ed. by Donald Smalley

(New York, 1949). All references to Domestic Manners are taken from this edition.

2. Captain Frederick Marryat, A Diary in America (Paris, 1839), 168.

3. Domestic Manners, 88-89.

4. Ibid., 58.

5. Ibid., 91-92.

6. Cincinnati newspapers abound with accounts of Mrs. Trollope and her book. They

provide many delicious anecdotes on the squat, red-faced Englishwoman, who failed

in a department store venture called "Trollope's Bazaar" at Third and Broadway.

7. Clara Longworth de Chambrun, Cincinnati, Story of the Queen City (New York,

1939), 145.

8. Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography (London, 1833), 31-32.

9. William H. Venable, Beginnings of Literary Culture in the Ohio Valley (Cincinnati,

1891).

10. Ralph L. Rusk, The Literature of the Middle Western Frontier (New York, 1926);

James M. Miller, The Genesis of Western Culture: The Upper Ohio Valley, 1800-1825

(Columbus, Ohio, 1938); R. Carlyle Buley, The Old Northwest: Pioneer Period, 1815-1840

(Indianapolis, 1950); Louis B. Wright, Culture on the Moving Frontier (Bloomington,

Indiana, 1955); Richard C. Wade, The Urban Frontier; The Rise of Western Cities,

1790-1830 (Cambridge, Mass., 1959). Practically all of these studies terminate at the

1830 period.

11. Walter Sutton, The Western Book Trade: Cincinnati as a Nineteenth-Century

Publishing and Book-Trade Center (Columbus, Ohio, 1961).