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W.[ashington] W.McDonough. Autograph Letter Signed. King Wills [Liberia], Dec. 11, 1844. 1pg.+stampless address leaf. To Hon. Walter Lowrie, Mission House, New York:

“…hoping that these will find you in as good health as I am in at present. Pleas to give my love to Mr. Wells and all inquiring friends. I have writen to him once since I left N.Y. but I have never received a single line from him. Pleas to send my watch by the first opportunnity. I have returned to King Wills with Mr. and Mrs. Priest, we are well but have not commence Keeping school on a large plan for our provisions will not allow us. As Abraham has left the Mission I suppose you would have no objections of my taking such of his books as will be of Service to me, Webster Dictionary which is one of the books that I wanted and several others. I wish you or Mr. Wells would be so kind as to present me a flute preceptor as I have got in the way of studing music I would like to keep on…”

McDonough was one of  eighty slaves freed and sent to Liberia in 1842 by eccentric Louisiana planter John McDonough. And being one of the sixty educated American ex-slaves who became missionaries in that new African nation, he was thus one of the very few African-Americans who could read and write before the Civil War, as slave education was strictly forbidden in the South. Early letters written by African-Americans born into slavery are thus rare indeed.

Missionaries like McDonough and James Priest, a brilliant ex-slave from Kentucky who later became Vice President of Liberia and Associate Justice of its Supreme Court, suffered great privation in their new African homes, given only miserly support by the American Colonization Society and the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions, of which former U.S. Senator Walter Lowrie was corresponding Secretary. While faced with sometimes violent opposition from African natives who resented the superior-sounding American interlopers, McDonough and his colleagues had a thirst for knowledge and culture hardly satisfied by life in their primitive and inhospitable surroundings.