DOUGLASS, FREDERICK

Autograph Letter Signed, to Amy Post of Rochester. 475 words. Single 4to leaf, folded to form 4 pages; short archival repair to one corner, couple of cracks at folds, small dampstain. Washington, D.C., 27 August 1884 A letter of exceptional content. The recipient of this letter was Douglass's oldest friend in Rochester and companion in the fight for abolition and equality. Following the death of his wife in 1882, Douglass slipped into a deep depression. During this time, while recorder of deeds in Washington D.C., he hired Helen Pitts, a white woman and the daughter of an old abolitionist friend to be his clerk. They became close and after a reasonable period of mourning, were quietly married by Rev. Francis Grimke, himself of mixed (and notable) parentage. The reaction to the Douglass's marriage surprised both Helen (an active abolitionist and feminist) and Douglass, who thought, naively, that this union would symbolize an end to prejudice. However, in addition to a great public outcry, not only did Helen's father Gideon, once a staunch abolitionist, cut off all relations with the couple, but Douglass's own children rejected them. In this letter to Amy Post, Douglass tells of the couple's wedding trip and his surprise and indignation at the objections to the marriage: "What business has the world with the color of my wife? It wants to know how old she is? how her parents and friends like her marriage? how I courted her? whether with love or money? Whether we are happy or miserable now that we have been married seven months?... I do not have to satisfy the public on these points -- but there is one upon which I wish you as an old and dear friend to be entirely satisfied and that is: that Helen and I are making life go very happily and that neither of us has yet repented of our marriage..." This letter is reprinted almost in its entirety in William S. McFeely's Frederick Douglass, pages 322-323.