J[ohn] Sella Martin to Frederick Douglass, February 8, 1859

LETTER FROM REV. J. S. MARTIN.

FRIEND DOUGLASS:—I steal these few moments from the side pocket of my engagements to communicate some of the encouraging features of my last six weeks' labor. At Union Village, some three weeks ago, I lectured on the same theme and in the same house that had engaged your own matchless eloquence, and reverberated your own inimitable appeals in behalf of humanity. The large Baptist Church there, containing over six hundred members, and which I should think holds about a thousand, was crowded to its utmost capacity, and it was estimated that two or three hundred failed to gain admission.

Never before did I realize so fully the responsibilities which devolve upon him who volunteers to become the mouth-piece of the dumb and the champion of the down-trodden. As I arose, I said, as I felt, could this audience with its thousand throbbing hearts, which makes timely music to the march of the bondman's hopes, be transported to some plantation, I would be willing to spend another year in bondage myself.

I had preached about four sermons there during the week that I lectured, and I perceived that the evidences of the great revival last year were more substantially visible than in many places in the country. I had been prepared by my social intercourse with the people to expect remarkable exhibitions of tenderness, both on the part of the speaker and the audience, and I at least was not disappointed. The pastor there, Rev. J. O. Mason, is a man whose heart can be measured only by his well balanced and comprehensive mind, and whose character can only be fully appreciated by the analysis of those individual traits which in matters of reform are too radical to be misunderstood, and too conservative to be disliked.

I came in contact with some of your old friends, the Garrisonians, whose love toward you can be explained in the old proverb which says something about the Devil and holy

water, and I gained further evidences of their "Alpha and Omega" anti-slavery. The Garrisonians are great people. If you call upon them first when you go to a city, and denounce every body that does not agree with them, you are a great man. If you state in your lecture that Garrison is Alpha, and the party Omega, then you are an eloquent man. If you sit still, and let them get up the meetings, publish your notices, etc., and deduct expenses from the collection, then you are an honest man. But when I went to Union Village I failed to do these things, and so they would not come either to hear my preaching or lecturing, thinking, as is usual under such circumstances, that I was an impostor.

I have been laboring for the last two weeks at Sandy Hill, where I have preached every night but two for eighteen consecutive nights; and although some few Democrats thought that there was some collision between myself and the Pastor to hold a series of anti-slavery meeting under the inviting name of a revival, and denounced my preaching accordingly, yet the house seats five hundred, and nearly every night they had to bring in extra benches to accommodate those who by their constant presence became a party to the infidelity manifested toward the American trinity, slavery Democracy, and silence. I did not forget, and I never shall while my right hand remembers its cunning, our manhood's Jerusalem. I did not forget to tell them that Jesus would scorn all homage paid to him as the victim of cruelty on Calvary, while they forget their brethren are the victims of slavery in Georgia.

The subscribers I sent you from SANDY HILL manifest as much solicitude for the safe arrival of Frederick Douglass` Paper, as if it had been a constant visitor for years. A young lady said to me, after reading your paper, "why, your people have a large number of literary stars." Your paper, containing Dr. Smith's article on Civilization, is doubtless worn out ere this from the frequent changes of lending and borrowing through which it has passed. Indeed, that article contains a half hour's feast for any man, and for most, material for a lifetime's digestion. I feel that the digestive organs of my own mind are strenthened to a more facile performance of their functions at each succeeding perusal of this compendium of physiological, ethnological and circumstancial history; and whatever fate may await the Anglo-African Magazine, whether it shall be frozen to death in the

winter of our indifference, or scorched to death in the heat of our malice and denunciation, or whether, like your own noble paper, it shall live in spite of both of these and bless the people by its blooms of spring and its fruit of autumn, it must at least be said of the publishers that they have selected the right seed, whether they have planted in the right soil or not. I for one shall breathe in its spreading sails the breezes of my own humble prayers for its success.

That is quite a joke on our white brethren of the mystic [tie], who thought that the granting of a charter to the colored Masons of Liberia was sufficient reason for withdrawing the charter from the State Grand Lodge so granting; yet in their advertisements of a monthly periodical, "The American Free Mason" numbers Rev. J. Theodore Holly among the greatest living Masonic writers of the age. But they are not the only people in the world who have hated the Devil and drank his broth. An eminent white Mason in N. Y. City said to me that he thought Mr. Holly's articles should be published in book form as an accurate compendium of Masonic jusisprudence, philosophy and religion. But that recommendation was superfluous, for if our white brethren fail to do so because there are no chemicals of sufficient affinity with the light and Mr. Holly's complexion, there is ambrotypic art and Masonic science enough among their black brethren to give the world in book form both his likeness and his writings. I should like for the world to know more of Mr. Holly through the A. A. Magazine.

By the way, would it not be a capital thing for you to get some of your English friends to send you Mr. Aldridge's (the tragedian) photograph. I think it would sell well, and thus compensate you for your trouble, while it gratified our curiosity. I will be one of a club of one hundred who will give five dollars for a galaxy containing Douglass, Smith, Garnet, Ward and Aldridge.

More anon,

J. SELLA MARTIN.

BUFFALO, Feb. 8th, 1859.