Douglass, Frederick (1817-1895)

Frederick Douglass (1817-1895)

Sources

Reformer, lecturer, and journalist

Youth. Frederick Douglass was born a slave in Tuckahoe, Maryland. He often lamented that he did not know the exact date on which he was born. His father, it was whispered, was his white master, and his mother was Harriet Bailey, whom he barely knew because she was sent to work on a plantation twelve miles away. When he was seven his mother stopped coming for her irregular nighttime visits (the only time she could get away from her work), and he was later informed that she had died. “Never having enjoyed, to any considerable extent, her soothing presence, her tender and watchful care, I received the tidings of her death with much the same emotions I should have probably felt at the death of a stranger,” he wrote in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845). At the age of eight he was sent to Baltimore, where he served as a houseboy and in a shipyard. His mistress also began to teach him to read and write, but when her husband found out, he told her, within Douglass’s hearing, “Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world. Now, if you teach that nigger how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave.” This warning made a deep impression. “From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom,” Douglass wrote. He learned to read and write by enlisting the unwitting aid of his white playmates in the Baltimore streets.

Escape. When he was returned to the Maryland plantation in 1832, Douglass made up his mind to escape. His first attempt was unsuccessful, and his master again sent him to Baltimore in 1836, where Douglass became a skilled craftsman in the shipyards. On 3 September 1838 Douglass borrowed the uniform and papers of a free black sailor and sailed north to freedom. On 15 September he married Anna Murray, a free black woman he had met in Baltimore. Together they moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where Douglass hoped to find work in the shipyards but instead had his first lesson in Northern prejudice. Unable to find work in his field, he and his wife lived on the meager wages of a day laborer. All the while, though, Douglass was an avid reader of William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator and attended antislavery meetings.

Reformer. In August 1841, at an abolitionist meeting in Nantucket, Massachusetts, Douglass was asked to ascend the platform and talk about his experiences as a slave. Thus began his new career as a lecturer for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. Douglass traveled the lecture circuit for four years, becoming the most prominent black figure in America. But his exceptional skill as an orator led many white audiences to question his slave upbringing and hence the veracity of his stories condemning slavery. In response he published Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, one of the few slave narratives that was not ghostwritten. It explained his early life and how he came to gain his extensive knowledge and oratorical skills. But his narrative also put him in danger because its publication revealed his whereabouts to his master. As a result Douglass traveled to England, where he met many sympathetic abolitionists who helped him raise the money to buy his freedom. He also was given enough money to begin his own abolitionist newspaper, which he did when he returned to America in 1847, calling it the North Star. The paper championed the abolitionist cause as well as civil rights for free blacks. It was published, under various names, until 1863. Throughout this period Douglass was also active in other reform movements, including temperance and women’s rights. He participated in the 1848 Seneca Falls convention and argued for women’s equal participation in African American abolitionist societies, but he always felt that the abolition of slavery had to be his first cause. In an 1855 speech to a women’s abolitionist group he categorized the split of the American Anti-Slavery Society over the “side issue” of women’s active participation as a serious weakening of the abolitionist movement. “The battle of Women’s Rights should be fought on its own ground,” he told the audience.

Legacy. Douglass devoted his life to the cause of racial uplift in all aspects, seeking justice as well as freedom for African Americans in the North and the South. He helped more than four hundred slaves reach freedom through his printing shop (which was a stop on the Underground Railroad), campaigned against the discrimination that kept African Americans out of jobs as skilled laborers, challenged racial segregation on public transportation and in businesses, and encouraged free blacks to adopt the middle-class values of industry, thrift, and temperance as the path to American success. Douglass also became politically active in his fight to abolish slavery, supporting the Republican Party and rejecting Garrisonian abolitionism’s sole reliance on moral suasion. Douglass came to support violent uprisings among slaves, violent resistance to enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and direct involvement in politics to create a party that could oppose the concessions Congress was making to powerful Southern legislators. Even as the abolitionist movement came to an end, Douglass continued his fight for equality. During the Civil War, Douglass fought for the inclusion of black soldiers in the Northern ranks. After the war he focused his efforts on voting rights. “Slavery is not abolished,” he said, “until the black man has the ballot.” Throughout Reconstruction he actively pursued his commitment to civil rights for African Americans. After the failure of Reconstruction, Douglass rejected migration to the North as an escape from the often violent prejudice of the South and insisted that African Americans be fully protected by the law everywhere in America. The unrelenting Douglass lectured to the National Council of Women on the day that he died, 20 February 1895.

Sources

Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, in Classic Slave Narratives, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Mentor, 1987);

Nathan Irvin Huggins, Slave and Citizen: The Life of Frederick Douglass (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980).