Oliver Old School to Frederick Douglass, March 29, 1860

HUDSON RIVER INCIDENTS.

[For Frederick Douglass' Paper.]

The Hudson River is termed by many the Rhine of America, on account of its beautiful natural scenery. It is argued by some persons that wild and mountanic scenery is favorable to intellectual development, although I am confident that it has not proven so in our case along the banks of this majestic stream. We have enjoyed all the advantages of common schools in this vicinity for the past twnety years, and yet you can find men and women who have grown up under these advantages, and are unable to read and write. The questions naturally enough then flows: Why are these things so? Is the fault with ourselves or the authorities? I answer in both: in many instances our children have been driven out of the public schools because they were black, and when provisions were made to furnish them with a separate school they were of such a horrid character, that no child would take any interest in them. Some old barn of a place, situated in a back and muddy alley, was generally the colored school house—a nuisance to the village; an old superannuated white person was the teacher, whose principal business was to receipt for their salaries at the end of every month; and in this manner, year after year, we have been compelled to submit to these gross impositions, and suffer our children to grow up in ignorance under the public school system of the Empire State. Notwithstanding all these difficulties, there are men to be found along the Hudson River who have come up from the common walks of life by perseverance, until they are able to make themselves felt in the communities in which they live.

We have another great evil in our midst; it is the number of petty factions, called churches, that exist in almost every village.—In Hudson we have three colored Methodist churches; in Poughkeepsie, two Zion Methodist churches; and so I might go on. The reason for this is the low standard adopted by the ministers, who always go down to the people, instead of urging them to a higher standard; and thus we are imposed upon by these lazy, would-be great men, who keep the people divided in order to get a living without work.

There are some of the minsters who are noble exceptions to the class that I have just spoken of; they are always to be found working for the elevation of their people, both in and out of their pulpits. There are those among us who would be great without any merit of their own. I was much surprised the other day by a gentleman who said to me, 'Who is Rev. T. Doughty Miller?' With astonishment I informed him that he was the

pastor of the Hamilton Street Baptist Church, Albany—the gentleman who first gave the public information of the declining popularity of Re. Henry Ward Beecher—preached a sermon which a gentleman from Boston requested him to publish—wrote a letter in reply to an invitation to officiate, in common with other clergymen, at the opening of the sessions of the State Assembly, and then published his letter in the Anglo-African. He is the gentleman who has a great lecture written upon the subject of Woman, wherein her true sphere of action is set forth and vindicated; in fact, he is one of our great men, but few of the people know it, and he is determined that they shall. I recollect hearing an anecdote, when a boy, of a German in the Keystone State, who sought after fame in many ways, but never could succeed. At last, said he to a friend, 'I have a project on hand that will lay them all in the shade.'—'What is it?' said his friend. 'Why, on Saturday next I am goin' to trow, te old man's house out te garret wintow; den let 'em blow about tare smartness.'

Navigation is now open, and business is quite brisk. Politicians are running to and fro, martialing their hosts for the great contest in the coming autumn.

Yours, truly,

O. Old School.

HUDSON, March 29, 1860.