Communipaw [James McCune Smith] to Frederick Douglass, September 1855

FROM OUR NEW YORK CORRESPONDENT.

MR. EDITOR:—I do not know whether it was the autumn wind or the current month—to me the saddest of the year—or what, that gave a sombre hue to my last letter. As we advance in life the "garlands dead" festoon the weary soul, and chill its susceptibilities to the joys of our youth. May you never live to feel a joyless joy pass over your spirits: yet from even then we must reason: we must rise from the grave of our private griefs to the serener heaven of the general good: did you ever have a glimpse straight through things? Did it ever seem to you that life and its issues became transparent, and the moyer beyond stood up betrayed, and the why and the wherefore of this pain, that joy and the other anxiety stood out as the mere PABULA to feed and occupy the soul during its brief strut in this lite? How bewildered and dazed the eyesight after such inquest! Suppose when you meet in Philadelphia, you organize a

CONVENTION OF IDEAS.

Old Thomas Aquinas held such a meeting when he discovered that "all men are born equal." Tom Jefferson diluted the idea centuries afterward when he interpolated "free." I rather think the general or public meeting which Aquinas inaugurated, and at which Jefferson reported his celebrated "Declaration," is not yet adjourned: committees are out, which are yet to report, some at Sebastopol, some in Kansas: how wearily the debate drags on: how many heads have been split open, from within and without: yet the human tide flows on, like some great river unconscious almost of what agitates and directs its course.

In what I said about the repulsions among our people, I describe their natural state: it will require labor, patience and time to change this into a higher or social state, in which attractious shall be substituted for repulsions: but time and labor and patience will be of no avail without IDEAS: I don't know that it will be a clear statement, but it seems that we are at once in a natural and spiritual state: the social state quoad nos (as to us) seems elided from our equation: hence we need at one and the same time elevation from the natural and depression from the spiritual state in order to become mixed up in the social progress of this

land. The world around us acknowledges our spiritual supremacy, when it magnifies our delinquencies or crimes; it is bad enough for a white man to hold a slave, or sell his daughter, but for a black!

There is another element in our general character, little understood by those who would doctor us. We are as a writer in Putnam states, an aesthetic people: we have an inborn love of art: how much this explains! Poor black humanity, too poor to have marbled halls and pictured galleries of its own, cleaving to the walls and the ceilings and the halls where these things be, would rather be a door keeper in the temples of art, than a raw-boned angular struggler with wiry independence! Poor black humanity, preferring the ease and luxury of a barber's shop and its lute, or viol, or tambour, or traveling around hatless and shirtless along with the brass bands which play from Zampa or Lucy Neal—ye vagrant inchoate troubadours, from whose souls has sprung the music of this land, ye are scolded, and lashed, and "larrupped," just as your art-fubears have been in all time, because you don't take a shovel and pickaxe semi-starvation, and, paddy-like, to death—I mean soul death. Why don't these straight-laced reformers, turn round and lash Paddy for fraternizing with mother earth, and digging it? The one is about as rational as the other, ye Gradgrind Sawdusters!

Here we have another rough, granitic truth cropping out. Our industrial difficulty is ac-counted for. It was Athens, not Sparta, Italy, not Holland, which gave birth to the children of art: and to-day, if a stray artist be born in England or America, he must forsake the looms, the work shop dust, and the railroads, and go and eat Italian dirt. The reason why our youth do not learn trades, why our people are not mechanics, lies not in the difficulty of learning trades, or of pursuing them—no! it is in our essentially aesthetic or art-nature. We may be carefully hatched as chickens, but the first glimpse of liberty will find us on our way to the dark-pond: and the old hens (such as Greeley) may cackle till their very pin feathers drop; they cannot restrain us from the luxuriant case for the enjoyment of which God gave us the web feet!

But what are we to do with this natural, spiritual aesthetic being, the free black? I don't know, Mr. Editor: all I can hope to do is to describe his case: tell you what you have to deal with. Ethiop, living on Long Island, is "rooty," and before (? behind) the convention, perhaps he

can recussitate something which will be of service.

Let us have free thought, and plenty of it, at Philadelphia: let each and all have his full say, no matter how tedious or dull to the ears of us fast men; we do not know to what babe or suckling the words of wisdom may be vouchsafed. Let our well-to-do Philadelphia friends, instead of laying themselves out in feasts and entertainments, let them club their pennies together and engage a first rate reporter, to take down and write out in full all the speeches of everybody: let us publish these along with an accurate roll; and then men will have something to show their constituents when they go home, and their constituents will find something to read and understand: for I am told that one great difficulty about the sequelae of the Rochester Convention was, that people could not understand the intricate plans, and constitutions, and reports. Give us at Philadelphia, then, IDEAS plain, pure and simple—ideas that shall sow the germs of self-reliance, self-elevation, and mutual confidence in each other. If we only pass this resolve, after fair discussion, how it will shake the dry bones of many a rickety plan!

Resolved, That we utterly discountenance all schemes for founding, endowing, building or assisting institutions for colored men, which call for contributions in money or money's worth from the whites.

It strikes me that I can almost see some pious brethren who are buying lots and building houses for themselves, out of monies solicited in the name of God for the salvation of the benighted colored poor, "coming down" on this resolution like inter-tropical thunder.

Then try another:

"Resolved, That the colored man or woman who neglects to support in business, his colored brother or sister, is recreant to the cause of the down-trodden, and helps pile oppression on him or herself."

Suppose, then, in addition to its REPORTS, the Philadelphia Convention gets up no plans, but simply announces these, or like IDEAS, and makes provision to keep them before all our people, monthly, weekly, daily, by newspaper, pamphlet or tract—will it not sow good seed, which, after a little, may be gathered and garnered in the shape of efforts which must succeed, because they will have the souls of the people to back them up? We had better begin slowly: I find that in elevating our people, we have a heavier labor than we thought of: we have to raise the whole social fabric along with them—whites as well as blacks: and some

of us will get the back ache if we lift too high in the jump.

I see that in this week's Standard

BROTHER OLIVER JOHNSON

betrays a close reading of Communipaw`s letters—may, he has changed his opinion of me so far, as to quote me, not as a lying and "malicious blunderer," but as a veracious witness in behalf of that scandalous vituperation of the Tribune, which even its editor, when called upon, dared not attempt to support with the proofs. I do not feel much honored in such graceless company, and fear that my reputation may suffer by it. I said that brother Johnson reads, but I am sure he does not understand my letters. If he understood what I said under the head of "our leaders," he would know that, with our natural affinity to the whites, and our especial affinity to Mr. Garrison twenty-four years ago, Mr. Garrison could have done much to elevate and improve our condition, had he deemed it worth while to do so: and if we, who were as clay in his hands then, are what the Tribune calls us now, "indolent, improvident, servile and licentious," then the blame falls with crushing effect on Mr. Garrison and his party, who have left us poor, and blind, and bleeding, whilst he and they have followed, first the $100,000 fever, then anti-Sabbath, then something else, and lastly, the Phantom of Disunion.

Let me submit here, that, when months ago, I likened Brother Johnson to a "Turkey buzzard," there were those of your readers who thought the comparison unjust and low: I felt at the time that such labored under an intellectual hebetude, which did not suffer them to see the propriety of a black man throwing ink right into the eyes of an insulting white man: such people thought that we blacks should be respectfully sarcastic, and fawningly plain spoken; that we should pull off our hats and mincingly grin, and in the flat key notes of our voice, whine out, "my dear Mr. A. B., or O. J., permit me most respectfully to insinuate, my dear sir, that you are a—turkey buzzard, sah!" Now, when these folks observe that Mr. Oliver Johnson, assistant editor of the A. S. Standard, avoids placing in its columns any notice of the doings of the colored people in Troy Conventions, in mass meetings, equal rights and legal rights associations—all of them labors, showing that this people are awaking to the necessity of struggling for their rights—when

all these things are excluded from the Standard, and the malignant, groundless, slanderous falsehoods of the Tribune`s editor, regarding the colored people, are caught up, and paraded and gloated over by his assistant editor in the Standard, if he does not prove himself to be a Turkey Buzzard, what is he?

But I intend to be very gentle with Brother Johnson this time: I would even hazard a word of advice: it is this, the next time—to use his own language in the Standard of the 22d—his "mind is so distracted" as to need "sobering;" let him not go the Theatre as he did, to see Rachel, as he describes her, "in all her gestures the very poetry of motion," and then, as he says he did "tremble under her fierce glances," and "passion." No, my dear Brother John-son, don't do so when your "mind is distracted;" it may make you feel worse: take my advice, go home, or to Dr. Tralls, get a nice cool bath, then try the wet bandage round your burning brow, and, if you have such a thing about the house, open the Bible and read certain portions of St. Paul's epistles—and I am no doc—if you don't feel better. Above all things, when "distracted," don't read nor quote.

Yours till death,

COMMUNIPAW.

NEW YORK, Sept., 1855

P. S.—Brother Johnson is at liberty to put this into the Standard, if he like. It will ex-plain my reference to St. Paul, when I inform him that I had the honor to represent St. Philip's in the Diocesan Convention which has just adjourned.