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WASHINGTON, D.C., April 19, 1883.

HON. FRED. DOUGLASS.

DEAR SIR:  Your speech, delivered on last Monday evening, at the Congregational Church, possesses, in our judgment, peculiar value at this point in the history of the Negro.

It is not easy for our white fellow citizens to understand how, with personal freedom and the ballot, we still have a cause that is worth hearing and patiently considering, but you have stated the difficulties that yet environ the colored American with such precision and clearness that no man, who reads your masterly effort, can fail to see that the Negro's way is still a rough and thorny one. We wish, therefore, that a copy of your address could be placed in the hands of every voter in the country, and we take this method of asking your consent to its publication in pamphlet form, to the end that it may receive wide distribution.

Respectfully,

B. K. BRUCE.
WM. WARING.
M. M. HOLLAND.
JAS. H. SMITH.
W. H. BLACK.
A. ST. A. SMITH.
P. H. CARSON.
JNO. F. COOK.
GEO. C. SMITH.
JNO. A. GRAY.
CHAS. A. LEMAR.
JOSEPH BROOKS.
GEO. H. RICHARDSON.
F. L. CARDOZO.
JAS. M. GREGORY.
GEO. W. COOK.
WILEY LANE.
W.C.CHASE.
J.W. CROMWELL.
JOHN. M. BROWN.
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WASHINGTON, D. C., April 23, 1883.

GENTLEMEN: I am obliged by you respected letter requesting a copy of my recent speech in the Congregational Church of this city, on the occasion of the twenty-first anniversary of Emancipation in the District of Columbia, to be published in pamphlet form.

It gives me great pleasure to comply with your request.

Respectfully yours,

                              FREDERICK DOUGLASS.
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FRIENDS AND FELLOW CITIZENS: I could have wished that some one from among the younger men of Washington, some one with a mind more fruitful, with a voice more eloquent, with an oratorical ambition more lofty, more active, and more stimulating to high endeavor than mine, had been selected by your Committee of Arrangements, to give suitable utterance to the thoughts, feelings, and purposes, which this 21st anniversary of Emancipation in the District of Colombia is fitted to inspire. That such an one could have been easily found among the aspiring and promising young colored men of Washington, I am happy to know and am proud to affirm. They are the legitimate children of the great act we are met to celebrate. They have been reared in the light of its new born freedom, qualified by its education, and by the elevating spirit of liberty, to speak the wise and grateful words befitting the occasion. The presence of one such, as your orator to-night, would be a more brilliant illustration of the wisdom and beneficence of the act of Emancipation, then any words of mine, however well chosen and appropriate. I represent the past, they the present. I represent the downfall of slavery, they the glorious triumphs of liberty. I speak of deliverance from bondage, they speak of concessions to liberty and equality. Their mission begins where my mission ends.

Nevertheless, while I would have gladly given place to one of these rising young man, I could not well declined the duty and the honor of appearing here to-night. It may, after all,