George T. Downing to Frederick Douglass, July 12, 1859

THE DECEPTIVE AFRICAN CIVILIZATION SOCIETY.

DEAR DOUGLASS:—I cannot well, for the want of time, nor am I disposed to enter into a discussion with Mr. Wm. Herries, as to the merits of his article published in your last.—You have fully answered all of the same that I would have cared to set your readers right about. I thank you for your act of justice.

Wall Street has it's 'Bulls' and its 'Bears, whose business it is to depress or cry up stock in the market, from which which some one expects to realize a profit. The African Civ. Society—stock in the market—has its 'Bulls' and its 'Bears,' which may, in the present case, be called 'outside dogs in the fight,' whose office it seems to be to snarl and bite for the Society at those who honestly think its formation unfortunate, if not positively wicked.

Excuse me for alluding to Mr. Herries, the outside gentleman in the fight, who takes pains to affirm, as did the Rev. J. W. Pennington, that he is not of the Society. He is an attache to the New York Tribune, in how high or low a capacity, I do now know. That he is high enough to get up squibs, is evident from the fact that he got up one in that paper, which went the round of the press, (a part of the duty of the 'Bulls' and the 'Bears,') saying that the Rev. Henry Highland Garnet had challenged (a frightful fact) certain parties to discuss the merits of the Society. The squib was not founded in the fact—the parties in question having never been challenged by the gentleman.

This 'outside gentleman' is most careful in not alluding to those parts of my article that are essential as bearing upon the animus of the Society. He does not deny that the African Civilization Society's spokesmen at its anniversary affirmed that 'it, the new So-

ciety, was formed because of an unjustifiable prejudice on the part of the colored people against the old American Colonization Society;' that said spokesmen on the same occasion declared that the colored man was out of his place here in America in the midst of the whites. Nor does he deny that the Rev. H. H. Garnet, a black man—yes, one of us, as we had supposed—did intimate on that occasion that colored men had no business here; that God Almighty intended certain localities for black men. A corresponding idea, or one akin to it, got off in Congress by my friend Wm. H. Seward, a white, struck me harshly. He said the white man had need for all this continent. Is not the expression of Garnet, a black, almost unpardonable?

Another fact— this outside gentleman in the fight places on the side of those 'for it' for the Society, certain names. I know that certain salaried persons there places 'blow' for the same; but I further know that certain other names are there placed as 'for it,' who are 'against it.' I name Stephen Smith and Martin R. Delany; I expect that the same is true of others.

GEO. T. DOWNING,

NEWPORT, JULY 12, 1859.