Women -- Suffrage -- History; Women -- Suffrage -- United States -- History; Women's rights -- History; Women's rights -- United States -- History
Is it possible that the swarming of the Irish, Swiss, and German
poor, to the city of New York, is attributable to the
intelligence offices and immigration societies of your city, and
not, as we have supposed, to the want of work and bread at home,
and is there really a danger, that in providing and calculating
for them, we shall strengthen the argument of race, while our
institutions of charity are filled with descendants of the Saxon,
the Norman, the Goth, and the Vandal? I think not.
Respectfully yours, JOSEPHINE S. GRIFFING.
_From the New National Era._
MRS. JOSEPHINE S. GRIFFING THE ORIGINATOR OF THE FREEDMEN's
BUREAU.
This truly excellent and noble woman was fitly spoken of in the
_New National Era_ just after her death, but at that early date
it was not possible to obtain the facts to prove the statement at
the head of this article, which is but simple truth and historic
justice.
Mrs. Griffing was engaged in an arduous work for the Loyal League
in the Northwest in 1862, and foresaw the need of a comprehensive
system of protection, help, and education, for the slaves in the
trying transition of freedom. She sought counsel and aid from fit
persons in Ohio and Michigan, and came here only in 1863 to begin
her work of urging the plan of a Bureau for that purpose. Nothing
daunted by coldness or indifference she nobly persisted, until in
December, 1863, a bill for a Bureau of Emancipation was
introduced in the House of Representatives by Hon T. D. Elliott,
of Massachusetts. After some changes in the bill, and a committee
of conference of the House and Senate, and the valuable aid of
Sumner, Wilson, and other Senators, the bill for the Freedman's
Bureau finally passed in March, 1865, and was signed by President
Lincoln just before his assassination.
The original idea was Mrs. Griffing's; her untiring efforts gave
it life, and it is but just that the colored people, of the South
especially, should bear in grateful remembrance this able and
gentle woman, whose life and strength were spent for their poor
sufferers, and who called into useful existence that great
national charity, the Freedman's Bureau.
The following letter from William Lloyd Garrison to Giles B. Stebbins,
then in Washington, corroborates the above statements:
ROXBURY, MASS., _March 4, 1872_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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