3: Frederick Douglass

Excerpt from "The Inhumanity of Slavery"

    Lecture delivered in Rochester, New York, on December 8, 1850.

    Reprinted in Autobiographies, 1994.

The national debate over slavery intensified during the 1840s as the United States added huge new territories that could potentially become new slave states. At that time in the nation's history, the country was becoming sharply divided between free states and slave states. Free states were located primarily in the North. They did not allow slavery and were opposed to its extension into new territories acquired by the Union. The slave states were found mainly in the South. These states wanted to protect their legal right to slavery and to extend that right throughout the nation, especially into new land acquired by the United States. Among the new territories added during the 1840s was the vast region called the Republic of Texas, which was admitted in 1845, becoming the twenty-eighth state in the Union. The sizeable region, which consisted of much of present-day New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and Utah, as well as all of California, was claimed by the United States upon winning the Mexican-American War (1846–48). In addition, present-day Kansas and Nebraska were not yet states.

"[S]lavery is alike the sin and the shame of the American people; it is a blot upon the American name, and the only national reproach which need make an American hang his head in shame, in the presence of monarchical governments."

In 1850 a series of laws were debated in the U.S. Congress that were intended to settle divisive debates about the spread of slavery. Under the proposed legislation, California would be admitted to the Union as a free state; the territories of New Mexico and Utah (encompassing present-day Utah and Nevada) would determine for themselves whether or not to permit slavery; and the Fugitive Slave Act, passed in 1850, would permit slave owners to enter non-slave states to pursue, capture, and return escaped slaves.

Frederick Douglass (c. 1817–1895), an ex-slave, was among the most persuasive and powerful spokespeople for abolition, ending slavery, to emerge on the national scene during the 1840s. Born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, he was separated from his mother as a boy and treated poorly by a cruel and violent slave owner. At nine, he was sent to Baltimore, Maryland, to work as a house servant for the daughter of the plantation owner where Douglass was a slave. The daughter often read aloud from the Bible, and Douglass asked her to teach him to read, although the woman's husband did not approve. Douglass had just a few lessons, but he realized that reading and writing was a way to freedom. In the South, slaves were not allowed to go to school or learn how to read and write. Douglass continued his education through interaction with people—by questioning and listening to them—and by reading anything he could find. He sometimes traded food for a newspaper or a book. By age thirteen, Douglass was reading abolitionist newspapers.

Becoming a social activist

At the age of twenty-one, Douglass traveled in disguise by train from Baltimore to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and on to New York City. If discovered, he could have been jailed, sold to plantation owners, or even killed. On September 4, 1838, he safely reached New York City. He married and moved to a safe haven in New Bedford, Massachusetts, living for a time with a prosperous African American family. Douglass quickly became involved with abolitionist groups. He attended a convention of the Massachusetts Antislavery Society in Nantucket, Massachusetts, in 1841 and was invited to speak. His skills as an inspiring and stirring public speaker were so well received that he was invited to become an activist with the group. William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879), publisher of the abolitionist newspaper the Liberator, hired Douglass to speak about his life story and help sell copies of the paper. In 1843 Douglass participated in the Hundred Conventions project, the American Anti-Slavery Society's six-month tour of meeting halls throughout the Midwest.

Meanwhile, Douglass wrote his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), recounting his life experiences in a strong moral tone directed against the evils of slavery for both victim and victimizer. The book was an instant success, widely popular in the North and in Europe. As a fugitive slave, however, Douglass had no legal protection if his former slave owner were to seize him as his "property." Douglass traveled to England for two years, during which time supporters, against his wishes, paid his owner for his freedom.

Returning to the United States in 1847, Douglass and his family (his wife and four children) moved to Rochester, New York. He set up a printing shop and started his own newspaper, the North Star. Featuring articles on abolition and equality, the North Star was published under the motto "Right is of no sex. Truth is of no color. God is the Father of us all, and we are all Brethren [brothers]." Meanwhile, Douglass participated in the Underground Railroad, a series of safe sites where escaped slaves could stop as they moved north to freedom in Canada. He helped more than four hundred slaves reach freedom.

From his base in Rochester, Douglass campaigned against labor discrimination and racial segregation (separation of the races) on public transportation, and he supported women's rights. He attended the landmark women's rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848 and signed the "Declaration of Sentiments" at the convention. He made many speeches against the series of bills Congress debated in 1850.

Things to remember while reading the excerpt from "The Inhumanity of Slavery":

• Douglass immediately challenges listeners who believe there are respectful relations between slave owners and slaves. His Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, published five years earlier, was among the most powerful writings to date on the brutalities of slave life. In the speech, Douglass cites laws that permit cruel and vicious treatment based on the judgment of slave owners, advertisements that identify and describe runaway slaves, and examples of slaves preferring to escape and take their chances surviving in wilderness and swamps over returning to life on a plantation.
• Douglass frequently uses biblical references and language associated with religion to emphasize the wickedness and evil in slavery. More than a political or economic issue, he describes slavery as a moral issue. Under those terms, he argues, slavery is not simply an abusive system, slavery itself is an abuse, a moral wrong.
• In the excerpt, Douglass mentions mobocratic violence in New York and Boston. Racism was rampant in many northern communities, and Douglass is referring to recent swells of group violence directed at African Americans.
• Douglass does not confine the evils of slavery to the southern states where it is practiced. "[T]he whole American people are responsible for slavery," he declares. He cites several examples of racist violence in the North—in New York City, in Boston, Massachusetts, and Rochester, New York, where the speech is being delivered. He is challenging listeners to act against slavery and racism. Otherwise, through their silence, they are indirectly supporting the existence of slavery.

Excerpt from "The Inhumanity of Slavery"

The relation of master and slave has been called patriarchal, and only second in benignity [safety] and tenderness to that of the parent and child. This representation is doubtless believed by many northern people; and this may account, in part, for the lack of interest which we find among persons whom we are bound to believe to be honest and humane. What, then, are the facts? Here I will not quote my own experience in slavery; for this you might call one-sided testimony. I will not cite the declarations of abolitionists; for these you might pronounce exaggerations. I will not rely upon advertisements cut from newspapers; for these you might call isolated cases. But I will refer you to the laws adopted by the legislatures of the slave states….

Now, if [these laws] be an indication of kindness, what is cruelty? If this be parental affection, what is bittermalignity? A more atrocious [awful] and blood-thirsty string of laws could not well be conceived of. And yet I am bound to say that they fall short of indicating the horrible cruelties constantly practiced in the slave states.

I admit that there are individual slaveholders less cruel and barbarous [harsh] than is allowed by law; but these form the exception. The majority of slaveholders find it necessary, to ensure obedience, at times, to avail themselves of the utmost extent of the law, and many go beyond it. If kindness were the rule, we should not see advertisements filling the columns of almost every southern newspaper, offering large rewards for fugitive slaves, and describing them as being branded with irons, loaded with chains, and scarred by the whip. One of the most telling testimonies against the pretended kindness of slaveholders, is the fact that uncounted numbers of fugitives are now inhabiting the Dismal Swamp, preferring the untamed wilderness to their cultivated homes—choosing rather to encounter hunger and thirst, and to roam with the wild beasts of the forest, running the hazard of being hunted and shot down, than to submit to the authority of kind masters.

I tell you, my friends, humanity is never driven to such an unnatural course of life, without great wrong. The slave finds more of the milk of human kindness in the bosom of the savage Indian, than in the heart of his christian master. He leaves the man of the bible, and takes refuge with the man of the tomahawk. He rushes from the praying slaveholder into the paws of the bear. He quits the homes of men for the haunts of wolves. He prefers to encounter a life of trial, however bitter, or death, however terrible, to dragging out his existence under the dominion [power] of these kind masters.

The apologists for slavery often speak of the abuses of slavery; and they tell us that they are as much opposed to those abuses as we are; and that they would go as far to correct those abuses and to ameliorate [improve] the condition of the slave as anybody. The answer to that view is, that slavery is itself an abuse; that it lives by abuse; and dies by the absence of abuse. Grant that slavery is right; grant that the relation of master and slave may innocently exist; and there is not a single outrage which was ever committed against the slave but what finds an apology in the very necessity of the case. As was said by a slaveholder, (the Rev. A. G. Few,) to the Methodist conference, "If the relation be right, the means to maintain it are also right;" for without those means slavery could not exist. Remove the dreadful scourge [plague]—the plaited thong —the galling [annoying] fetter —the accursed chain—and let the slaveholder rely solely upon moral and religious power, by which to secure obedience to his orders, and how long do you suppose a slave would remain on his plantation? The case only needs to be stated; it carries its own refutation [denial] with it.

Absolute and arbitrary power can never be maintained by one man over the body and soul of another man, without brutal chastisement [punishment] and enormous cruelty.

To talk of kindness entering into a relation in which one party is robbed of wife, of children, of his hard earnings, of home, of friends, of society, of knowledge, and of all that makes this life desirable, is most absurd, wicked, and preposterous [ridiculous].

I have shown that slavery is wicked—wicked, in that it violates the great law of liberty, written on every human heart—wicked, in that it violates the first command of the decalogue —wicked, in that it fosters the most disgusting licentiousness [wastefulness]—wicked, in that it mars and defaces the image of God by cruel and barbarous inflictions—wicked, in that it contravenes [contradicts] the laws of eternal justice, and tramples in the dust all the humane and heavenly precepts [teachings] of the New Testament.

The evils resulting from this huge system of iniquity [wickedness] are not confined to the states south of Mason and Dixon's line. Its noxious (poisonous) influence can easily be traced throughout our northern borders. It comes even as far north as the state of New York. Traces of it may be seen even in Rochester; and travelers have told me it casts its gloomy shadows across the lake, approaching the very shores of Queen Victoria's dominions.

The presence of slavery may be explained by—as it is the explanation of—the mobocratic [mob rule] violence which lately disgraced New York, and which still more recently disgraced the city of Boston [Massachusetts]. These violent demonstrations, these outrageous invasions of human rights, faintly indicate the presence and power of slavery here. It is a significant fact, that while meetings for almost any purpose under heaven may be held unmolested [untouched] in the city of Boston, that in the same city, a meeting cannot be peaceably held for the purpose of preaching the doctrine of the American Declaration of Independence, "that all men are created equal." The pestiferous [diseased] breath of slavery taints the whole moral atmosphere of the north, and enervates [weakens] the moral energies of the whole people.

The moment a foreigner ventures upon our soil, and utters a natural repugnance [extreme dislike] to oppression, that moment he is made to feel that there is little sympathy in this land for him. If he were greeted with smiles before, he meets with frowns now; and it shall go well with him if he be not subjected to that peculiarly fitting method of showing fealty [respect] to slavery, the assaults of a mob.

Now, will any man tell me that such a state of things is natural, and that such conduct on the part of the people of the north, springs from a consciousness of rectitude [decency]? No! every fibre of the human heart unites in detestation [hatred] of tyranny, and it is only when the human mind has become familiarized with slavery, is accustomed to its injustice, and corrupted by its selfishness, that it fails to record its abhorrence [hatred] of slavery, and does not exult in the triumphs of liberty.

The northern people have been long connected with slavery; they have been linked to a decaying corpse, which has destroyed the moral health. The union of the government; the union of the north and south, in the political parties; the union in the religious organizations of the land, have all served to deaden the moral sense of the northern people, and to impregnate [fill] them with sentiments and ideas forever in conflict with what as a nation we call genius of American institutions. Rightly viewed, this is an alarming fact, and ought to rally all that is pure, just, and holy in one determined effort to crush the monster of corruption, and to scatter "its guilty profits" to the winds. In a high moral sense, as well as in a national sense, the whole American people are responsible for slavery, and must share, in its guilt and shame, with the most obdurate men-stealers of the south.

While slavery exists, and the union of these states endures, every American citizen must bear the chagrin [embarrassment] of hearing his country branded before the world as a nation of liars and hypocrites; and behold his cherished national flag pointed at with the utmost scorn and derision [contempt]. Even now an American abroad is pointed out in the crowd, as coming from a land where men gain their fortunes by "the blood of souls," from a land of slave markets, of blood-hounds, and slave-hunters; and, in some circles, such a man is shunned altogether, as a moral pest. Is it not time, then, for every American to awake, and inquire into his duty with respect to this subject?

Wendell Phillips —the eloquent New England orator—on his return from Europe, in 1842, said, "As I stood upon the shores of Genoa [Italy], and saw floating on the placid waters of the Mediterranean, the beautiful American war ship Ohio, with her masts tapering proportionately aloft, and an eastern sun reflecting her noble form upon the sparkling waters, attracting the gaze of the multitude, my first impulse was of pride, to think myself an American; but when I thought that the first time that gallant ship would gird [bind] on her gorgeous apparel, and wake from beneath her sides her dormant thunders, it would be in defense of the African slave trade, I blushed in utter shame for my country."

Let me say again, slavery is alike the sin and the shame of the American people; it is a blot upon the American name, and the only national reproach [disgrace] which need make an American hang his head in shame, in the presence of monarchical governments.

With this gigantic evil in the land, we are constantly told to look at home; if we say ought against crowned heads, we are pointed to our enslaved millions; if we talk of sending missionaries and bibles abroad, we are pointed to three millions now lying in worse than heathen [nonbelievers] darkness; if we express a word of sympathy for Kossuth and his Hungarian fugitive brethren, we are pointed to that horrible and hell-black enactment, "the fugitive slave bill. "

Slavery blunts [dulls] the edge of all our rebukes of tyranny abroad—the criticisms that we make upon other nations, only call forth ridicule, contempt, and scorn. In a word, we are made a reproach and a by-word to a mocking earth, and we must continue to be so made, so long as slavery continues to pollute our soil.

We have heard much of late of the virtue of patriotism, the love of country, etc., and this sentiment, so natural and so strong, has been impiously [without respect] appealed to, by all the powers of human selfishness, to cherish the viper which is stinging our national life away. In its name, we have been called upon to deepen our infamy [bad reputation] before the world, to rivet the fetter more firmly on the limbs of the enslaved, and to become utterly insensible to the voice of human woe that is wafted to us on every southern gale. We have been called upon, in its name, to desecrate our whole land by the footprints of slave-hunters, and even to engage ourselves in the horrible business of kidnapping.

I, too, would invoke [appeal to] the spirit of patriotism; not in a narrow and restricted sense, but, I trust, with a broad and manly signification [significance]; not to cover up our national sins, but to inspire us with sincere repentance [regret]; not to hide our shame from the world's gaze, but utterly to abolish the cause of that shame; not to explain away our gross inconsistencies as a nation, but to remove the hateful, jarring, and incongruous [incompatible] elements from the land; not to sustain an egregious [obvious] wrong, but to unite all our energies in the grand effort to remedy that wrong.

I would invoke the spirit of patriotism, in the name of the law of the living God, natural and revealed, and in the full belief that "righteousness exalteth a nation, while sin is a reproach to any people." "He that walketh righteously, and speaketh uprightly; he that despiseth the gain of oppressions, that shaketh his hands from the holding of bribes, he shall dwell on high, his place of defense shall be the munitions [weapons] of rocks, bread shall be given him, his water shall be sure."

We have not only heard much lately of patriotism, and of its aid being invoked on the side of slavery and injustice, but the very prosperity [wealth] of this people has been called in to deafen them to the voice of duty, and to lead them onward in the pathway of sin. Thus has the blessing of God been converted into a curse. In the spirit of genuine patriotism, I warn the American people, by all that is just and honorable, to BEWARE!

I warn them that, strong, proud, and prosperous though we be, there is a power above us that can "bring down high looks; at the breath of whose mouth our wealth may take wings; and before whom every knee shall bow;" and who can tell how soon the avenging angel may pass over our land, and the sable [black] bondmen now in chains, may become the instruments of our nation's chastisement! Without appealing to any higher feeling, I would warn the American people, and the American government, to be wise in their day and generation. I exhort [strongly urge] them to remember the history of other nations; and I remind them that America cannot always sit "as a queen," in peace and repose; that prouder and stronger governments than this have been shattered by the bolts of a just God; that the time may come when those they now despise and hate, may be needed; when those whom they now compel by oppression to be enemies, may be wanted as friends. What has been, may be again. There is a point beyond which human endurance cannot go. The crushed worm may yet turn under the heel of the oppressor. I warn them, then, with all solemnity [seriousness], and in the name of retributive justice, to look to their ways; for in an evil hour, those sable arms that have, for the last two centuries, been engaged in cultivating and adorning the fair fields of our country, may yet become the instruments of terror, desolation, and death, throughout our borders.

It was the sage of the Old Dominion [territory] that said—while speaking of the possibility of a conflict between the slaves and the slaveholders—"God has no attribute that could take sides with the oppressor in such a contest. I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, and that his justice cannot sleep forever." Such is the warning voice of Thomas Jefferson; and every day's experience since its utterance until now, confirms its wisdom, and commends its truth.

What happened next …

The Compromise of 1850, which included the Fugitive Slave Act, passed the U.S. Congress and was signed into law by President Millard Fillmore (1800–1874; served 1850–53). The Fugitive Slave Act, the threat of slavery expanding into new states, and impassioned pleas by the likes of Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896), whose antislavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin was immediately popular upon publication in 1852, helped further the abolitionist movement.

The dispute over the expansion of slavery into western territories became even more heated in 1854 when a bill was introduced in Congress to organize the country west of Iowa and Missouri as the territory of Nebraska. The territory was to be divided into two parts, Kansas and Nebraska. The bill permitted the people of the territories, acting through their representatives, to decide whether the territory should be slave or free. Abolitionists were outraged, and passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act furthered tension between the North and the South. Wanting to ensure that Kansas would be a slave state, proslavery people from Missouri flooded into the territory, obtained the right to vote, and organized a proslavery legislature. At the same time, abolitionists moved into Kansas, organized their own legislature, and fought for free state status. The tense situation between longtime inhabitants and temporary residents, and pro-slavery people and abolitionists, erupted into a civil war, called "Bloody Kansas," in 1856.

Douglass met on several occasions with John Brown (1800–1859), a fiery abolitionist who preached violence against slave owners. Brown and a small band of followers were captured in 1859 as they assaulted an arsenal, a place where weapons were stockpiled, in Harpers Ferry, Virginia. They hoped to take guns and use them to arm slaves. Douglass was accused by the Governor of Virginia of being a conspirator. Douglass fled to Canada and then returned to Great Britain, where he enjoyed a successful lecture tour.

Douglass returned the following year and supported Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865; served 1861–65) in his successful run for president. When the American Civil War (1861–65) began shortly after Lincoln took office, Douglass was disappointed that Lincoln's first priority was to save the Union, even if it did not include the abolition of slavery. Douglass focused on two goals: emancipation of slaves and inclusion of African Americans in the Union army. The Emancipation Proclamation, announced by Lincoln in 1863, abolished slavery in the states fighting against the Union during the Civil War. It was a major step toward ending slavery and opened up military opportunities for African Americans.

Following the end of the Civil War in 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, abolishing slavery, became law. At a meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society in May 1865, one month after the end of the war, William Lloyd Garrison had called upon the organization to disband, now that its goal was achieved. Douglass came out against Garrison's proposal, stating that "Slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot." In 1868 the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, granting citizenship to all people born in the United States. Before that amendment, ex-slaves were not officially recognized as citizens. In 1870 the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, extending voting rights to African American males. Section 1 of the amendment states: "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."

In 1870 Douglass and his sons began publishing a weekly newspaper, the New National Era. He moved to Washington, D.C., in 1872 after his Rochester home was destroyed by fire. In 1877 President Rutherford B. Hayes (1822–1893; served 1877–81) appointed Douglass as U.S. marshal of Washington, D.C., a first for an African American. Douglass enjoyed the position of city administrator and purchased a 15-acre estate in the area. Douglass called it "Cedar Hill" and frequently entertained family members and friends. After giving a speech on February 20, 1895, at the National Council of Women, Douglass suffered a heart attack later that evening and died at the age of seventy-seven.

Meanwhile, a new form of racism had spread, particularly in southern states, during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. After several U.S. Supreme Court rulings struck down federal civil rights legislation in favor of state and community laws, many southern states began enacting what came to be known as "Jim Crow laws," which enforced separate facilities for blacks and whites. Segregation and more violent forms of racism were widespread by the turn of the twentieth century.

Did you know …

• Douglass was so eloquent in his early speeches in 1841 and 1842 that some people questioned whether he had actually experienced the incidents he related. Those doubts helped motivate Douglass to write his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845).
• Douglass's sons, Lewis and Charles, were among the first African Americans to enlist in the Union army, and Douglass actively recruited African Americans for the Union cause. He stopped recruiting, however, upon learning that segregation was being practiced in the military.

Consider the following …

• Research the Compromise of 1850. Consider why some significant politicians believed it would put an end to slavery. For example, three successive presidents—Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce (1804–1869; served 1853–57), and James Buchanan (1791–1868; served 1857–61)—all of whom were from northern states, supported the Compromise of 1850. Write an essay about why the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) increased tension between the North and the South.
• In the lecture excerpted earlier and in his book Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Douglass personalized the relationship between slave owner and slave to show the brutalities of slavery. Read either or both of those pieces, and focus on passages where examples of relationships between slaves and slave owners are described. Write an essay on how you responded to these passages, considering that many people believed the relationship between slave owner and slave was like a typical boss-worker arrangement.

For More Information

BOOKS

Burchard, Peter. Frederick Douglass: For the Great Family of Man. New York: Atheneum, 2003.

Douglass, Frederick. Autobiographies. New York: Library of America, 1994.

Douglass, Frederick. Escape from Slavery. New York: Knopf, 1994.

Douglass, Frederick. "Frederick Douglass's Speech to the Thirty-second Annual Convention of the American Anti-Slavery Society." Crossing the Danger Water: Three Hundred Years of African American Writing, edited by Dierdre Mullane. New York: Doubleday, 1993.

Douglass, Frederick. My Bondage and My Freedom. New York: Miller, Orton and Mulligan, 1855. Reprint, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987.

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1845. Reprint, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1997.

Fleming, Alice Mulcahey. Frederick Douglass: From Slave to Statesman. New York: PowerPlus Books, 2004.

Lawson. Bill E., and Frank M. Kirkland, eds. Frederick Douglass: A Critical Reader. New York: Blackwell Publishers, 1998.

Russell, Sharman. Frederick Douglass. New York: Chelsea House, 1992.

WEB SITES

Douglass, Frederick. My Bondage and My Freedom. FullBooks.com. http://www.fullbooks.com/My-Bondage-and-My-Freedom-My-Bondage-and-My.html (accessed on June 12, 2006).

Frederick Douglass Museum & Hall of Fame for Caring Americans. http://www.nahc.org/fd/history.html (accessed on June 12, 2006).

Frederick Douglass, National Historic Site. http://www.nps.gov/frdo/freddoug.html (accessed on June 12,2006).

Patriarchal: Father and son

Malignity: Being hateful or cruel.

Branded with irons: Marked with hot irons to identify them as someone's property.

Dismal Swamp: A large area of forested wetlands along the eastern border of Virginia and North Carolina.

Apologists: Those who, through argument, defend an idea, practice, or point of view.

Platited thong: A thick and heavy leather whip.

Fetter: Chains or shackles for the feet.

Decalogue: The Ten Commandments of the bible.

New Testament: The second half of the Christian bible.

Mason and Dixon's line: The southern, border of Pennsylvania, which before the American Civil War marked the border between free states and slave states.

Queen Victoria's dominions: Reference to Canada, which had ties to Great Britain and its Queen Victoria.

Obdurate: Hardened against feeling.

Hypocrites: Faking or only pretending to believe in something.

Wendell Phillips: (1811–1884), a prominent American abolitionist.

Monarchical governments: Monarchy; led by king or queen.

Kossuth: Reference to Lajos (Louis) Kossuth (1802–1894) who led Hungary during its fight for independence and democracy.

Fugitive slave bill: A bill, passed by Congress in 1850, that allowed slave owners to enter non-slave states to pursue, capture, and return escaped slaves.

Rivet: To join with a metal pin or bolt.

Desecrate: Violate the sacredness of.

Avenging: Inflicting punishment in return for an injury or wrongdoing.

Retributive: Punishment that is deserved because of some wrongdoing or evil.

Thomas Jefferson: (1743–1826), third president of the United States (served 1801–09), who wrote the Declaration of Independence.

5 Frederick Douglass

Excerpt from "Reconstruction" Published in Atlantic Monthly, 1866; reprinted on About.com (Web site)

A leading African American abolitionist fights for intervention from the federal government and Union military to gain equal rights for blacks

"If with the negro was success in war, and without him failure, so in peace it will be found that the nation must fall or flourish with the negro.…"

In many ways, the end of the American Civil War (1861–65) raised more questions than it answered. The North won the bloody struggle to end slavery and keep the South from seceding, or forming its own country. But how would these Southern states rejoin the Union? What changes would be made to their governments and their ways of life? What rights would African Americans have? And what would be their role in shaping a new South? The answers to these questions would define the process known as Reconstruction.

President Andrew Johnson (1808–1875; served 1865–69) developed the first Reconstruction policy during the summer of 1865, without any input from Congress. He appointed governors in each of the Southern states and required them to hold conventions to draft new state constitutions. The conventions were only open to men who were eligible to vote in 1860, effectively barring African Americans from participating in the process. (Johnson later argued that giving African American men the ballot would spark a racial war.) But most whites involved in the "rebellion" against the North could participate, as long as they had taken an oath of allegiance to the Union. The only exceptions were the highest ranking Confederates and Southerners with property worth more than $20,000 who had to apply to the president directly for a pardon.

Not surprisingly, these new Southern governments put prominent Confederates back in power without giving African American men the right to vote. Many Southern towns and states passed "Black Codes," discriminatory laws designed to keep African Americans under the control of whites. The laws in some areas barred African Americans from owning land or meeting after dark. Unemployed African Americans could be arrested and put to work for the white men who bailed them out. In South Carolina, African Americans had to get a special license to do any work besides farming. As noted in Frederick Douglass and the Fight for Freedom, "These so called 'Black Codes' virtually reconstituted [recreated] slavery in everything but name."

It was a devastating outcome for African Americans, particularly the 180,000 African American men who joined the Union army during the war to fight for their freedom. A group of African Americans met in Virginia in August 1865 to draft a message to Congress, reprinted on the "From Revolution to Reconstruction" Web site. They reminded Congress of the African Americans who helped in the war effort, only to see this sad result:

Four fifths of our enemies are paroled or amnestied [freed], and the other fifth are being pardoned, and the President has, in his efforts at the reconstruction of the civil government of these States … left us entirely at the mercy of these subjugated [defeated] but unconverted [unchanged] rebels, in everything save [except] the privilege of bringing us, our wives and little ones, to the auction block.…

Recognizing that Johnson's Reconstruction plan would leave the South largely unchanged, Congress responded with its own plan. The assembly refused to seat the ex-Confederates and other Southerners sent to Congress in December 1865. Instead, Congress created the Joint Committee on Reconstruction to hold hearings on Southern attitudes and offer a plan for rebuilding the region (see Chapter 7). Congress already created the Freedmen's Bureau (see Chapter 4) shortly before the war ended to provide food, lease land, and negotiate labor contracts for the newly freed slaves. It also officially ended slavery with the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (see Chapter 2), which was ratified by the states in 1865. In response to the Black Codes, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 (see Chapter 8) and proposed the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (see Chapter 9). Both measures (which passed over Johnson's objections) granted citizenship to African Americans and required they receive the same legal treatment as whites.

But it would take more than a couple of laws to change the way Southern whites treated African Americans. Visiting the South shortly after the war, Union general Carl Schurz (1829–1906) made the following observations, reprinted in A History of Affirmative Action, 1619–2000:

Wherever I go … I hear the people talk in such a way as to indicate that they are yet unable to conceive of the Negro as possessing any rights at all. Men who are honorable in their dealings with white neighbors, will cheat a Negro without feeling a single twinge of their honor.… The reason for all this is simple and manifest [obvious]. The whites esteem [consider] blacks their property by natural right … they still have an ingrained feeling that the blacks at large belong to the whites at large.

Frederick Douglass (1817–1895), a former slave who became a leader in the abolitionist (antislavery) movement, was well aware of the obstacles facing African Americans. Raised on a Maryland farm, Douglass escaped to New York at age twenty after experiencing first-hand the tragedies of slavery: brutal whippings, separation from family members, and the humiliation of belonging to another person. He contributed to antislavery newspapers before writing his life's story, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, in 1845. A couple of years later he created his own antislavery newspaper, North Star, named for the star used by slaves escaping to freedom in the North.

Douglass knew that ending slavery was only half the battle. African Americans needed to be able to rent or buy land so they could work for themselves. They also needed the right to vote and run for office, so they could support officials who would protect their rights. The passage of the Black Codes throughout the South showed how African Americans would be treated as long as Southern whites were in control. Any push for equal rights for blacks must come from the federal government, backed up by Union soldiers, Douglass argued in the following article from Atlantic Monthly magazine.

Things to remember while reading an excerpt from "Reconstruction":

• President Johnson drafted the first Reconstruction plan to bring the South back into the Union after the Civil War. Under his plan, Southern whites drafted new state constitutions and elected new officials, including many former Confederates. African Americans could not vote, however, and new laws called Black Codes restricted every aspect of their lives. These local laws barred African Americans from owning land, required them to get special permits for certain jobs, and allowed them to be arrested and put to work if they were unemployed.
• Congress rejected Johnson's Reconstruction plan and passed some measures of its own. It created the Freedmen's Bureau to provide supplies to African Americans and help them negotiate their labor contracts. Congress also passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and proposed the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution to outlaw the Black Codes and ensure equal legal treatment for African Americans.
• Douglass, a former slave who became a leading abolitionist, believed ending slavery was only half the battle. African Americans needed the right to vote and the ability to work for themselves in order to be free, he said. Knowing many Southern whites would not give African Americans these opportunities, Douglass called for Congress to lead the push for African Americans' rights and use Union troops to enforce those rights.

Excerpt from "Reconstruction"

The assembling of the Second Session of the Thirty-ninth Congress may very properly be made the occasion of a fewearnest words on the already much-worn topic of reconstruction.

Seldom has any legislative body been the subject of asolicitude more intense, or ofaspirations more sincere andardent. There are the best of reasons for thisprofound interest. Questions of vast moment, left undecided by the last session of Congress, must bemanfully grappled with by this. No politicalskirmishing willavail. The occasion demandsstatesmanship.

Whether the tremendous war so heroically fought and so victoriously ended shall pass into history a miserable failure,barren of permanent results,—a scandalous and shocking waste of blood andtreasure, —a strife forempire, … of no value to liberty or civilization,—an attempt to re-establish a Union by force, which must be themerest mockery of a Union,—an effort to bring under Federal authority States into which no loyal man from the North may safely enter, and to bring men into the national councils whodeliberate with daggers and vote with revolvers, and who do not even conceal their deadly hate of the country that conquered them; or whether, on the other hand, we shall, as the rightful reward of victory overtreason, have a solid nation, entirely delivered from all contradictions and socialantagonisms, based upon loyalty, liberty, and equality, must be determined one way or the other by the present session of Congress. The last session really did nothing which can be considered final as to these questions. The Civil Rights Bill and the Freedmen's Bureau Bill and the proposed constitutional amendments, with the amendment already adopted and recognized as the law of the land, do not reach thedifficulty, and cannot, unless the whole structure of the government is changed from a government by States to something like adespotic central government, with power to control even themunicipal regulations of States, and to make them conform to its own despotic will. While there remainssuch an idea as the right of each State to control its own local affairs,—an idea, by the way, more deeply rooted in the minds of men of all sections of the country than perhaps any one other political idea,—no generalassertion of human rights can be of any practical value. To change the character of the government at this point is neither possible nor desirable. All that is necessary to be done is to make the government consistent with itself, andrender the rights of the States compatible with the sacred rights of human nature.

The arm of the Federal government is long, but it is far too short to protect the rights of individuals in theinterior of distant States. They must have the power to protect themselves, or they will go unprotected,spite of all the laws the Federal government can put upon the nationalstatute-book.…

If time was at first needed, Congress has now had time. All therequisite materials from which to form an intelligent judgment are now before it. Whether its members look at the origin, the progress, thetermination of the war, or at the mockery of a peace now existing, they will find only one unbroken chain of argument in favor of a radical policy of reconstruction. For theomissions of the last session, some excuses may be allowed. Atreacherous President stood in the way; and it can be easily seen howreluctant good men might be to admit anapostasy which involved so much ofbaseness andingratitude. It was natural that they should seek to save him by bending to him even when he leaned to the side of error. But all is changed now. Congress knows now that it must go on without his aid, and even against hismachinations. The advantage of the present session over the last is immense. Where that investigated, this has the facts. Where that walked by faith, this may walk by sight. Where thathalted, this must go forward, and where that failed, this must succeed, giving the country whole measures where that gave us half-measures.… In everyconsiderable public meeting, and in almost everyconceivable way, whether at court-house, schoolhouse, or cross-roads, in doors and out, the subject has been discussed, and the people haveemphatically pronounced in favor of aradical policy. Listening to thedoctrines ofexpediency and compromise with pity, impatience, and disgust, they have everywhere broken into demonstrations of the wildest enthusiasm when a brave word has been spoken in favor of equal rights andimpartial suffrage. Radicalism, so far from beingodious, is not the popular passport to power. The men most bitterly charged with it go to Congress with the largest majorities, while the timid and doubtful are sent by lean majorities, or else left at home. The strange controversy betweenthe President and the Congress, at one time so threatening, isdisposed of by the people. The high reconstructive powers which he so confidently,ostentatiously, andhaughtily claimed, have been disallowed,denounced, and utterlyrepudiated; while those claimed by Congress have been confirmed.…

Without attempting to settle here themetaphysical and somewhattheological question (about which so much has already been said and written), whether once in the Union means always in the Union … it is obvious to common sense that the rebellious States stand to-day, in point of law, precisely where they stood when, exhausted, beaten, conquered, they fell powerless at the feet of Federal authority. Their State governments were overthrown, and the lives and property of the leaders of the Rebellion wereforfeited. In reconstructing the institutions of these shattered and overthrown States, Congress should begin with a clean slate, and make clean work of it. Let there be no hesitation. It would be a cowardlydeference to a defeated and treacherous President, if any account were made of theillegitimate, one-sided,sham governments hurried into existence for amalign purpose in the absence of Congress. These pretended governments, which were never submitted to the people, and from participation in which four millions of the loyal [African American] people were excluded by Presidential order, should now be treated according to their true character, as shams andimpositions, andsupplanted by true andlegitimate governments, in the formation of which loyal men, black and white, shall participate.…

The plain, common-sense way of doing this work, asintimated at the beginning, is simply to establish in the South one law, one government, one administration of justice, onecondition to the exercise of the elective franchise, for men of all races and colors alike. This great measure is sought as earnestly by loyal white men as by loyal African Americans, and is needed alike by both. Let sound politicalprescience but take the place of an unreasoning prejudice, and this will be done.…

The policy thatemancipated and armed the negro—now seen to have been wise and proper by thedullest —was not certainly moresternly demanded than is now the policy ofenfranchisement. If with the negro was success in war, and without him failure, so in peace it will be found that the nation must fall or flourish with the negro.…

What happened next …

Congress passed the Reconstruction Act in 1867 setting a drastic new policy for bringing the Southern states back into the Union (see Chapter 10). The act divided the South into five military districts, each one headed by a Union general. Each state was required to draft a new state constitution at a convention open to African American and white delegates alike—except high-ranking ex-Confederates. African American and white men alike would get to vote on the constitution. Once the states approved new constitutions and ratified (formally confirm) the Fourteenth Amendment, they could be readmitted to the Union.

For the first time, these new state constitutions gave Southern African American men the ballot. About 703,400 African American men registered to vote that year, and about 2,000 African American men were elected to various offices during the next decade (see Chapter 12). To further protect the right of African American men to vote, Congress passed the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, ratified by the states in 1870, guaranteeing African American men the ballot (see Chapter 16). "We certainly hope that the time will come when the colored man in America shall cease to require special efforts to guard their rights and advance their interests as a class," Douglass wrote in an 1870 article supporting the Fifteenth Amendment, reprinted in A History of Affirmative Action, 1619–2000. "But that time has not yet come, and is not even at the door."

Indeed, that time would be decades away. When Reconstruction ended in 1877 with the withdrawal of federal troops (see Chapter 19), the Southern states started chipping away at the hard-won rights for African Americans. They imposed literacy tests (to test for ability to read and write) or poll taxes to discourage African Americans from voting. They created separate schools, railroad cars, and other facilities for African Americans and whites, a practice upheld by the Supreme Court in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling. Nearly a century passed after Reconstruction before the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s resumed the push for racial equality.

Did you know …

• Two of Douglass's sons, Lewis and Charles, served in the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Regiment, the first African American Union regiment to fight in the Civil War. The regiment was later made famous by the 1989 movie Glory starring Matthew Broderick (1962–) and Denzel Washington (1954–).
• After the death of his first wife, a former slave named Anna, Douglass caused a stir by marrying a white woman. The new Mrs. Douglass was Helen Pitts, a college-educated woman who had been Douglass's secretary. Interracial marriage was socially forbidden in that era, and even Douglass's children opposed the union. But for a man who spent his life preaching racial equality, the pairing was only natural. "I could never have been at peace with my own soul or held up my head among men had I allowed the fear of popular clamor [uproar] to deter [discourage] me from following my convictions as to this marriage," Douglass wrote in a letter reprinted in Frederick Douglass and the Fight for Freedom.
• Douglass was a strong supporter of women's rights, including the suffrage movement to grant women the right to vote. He participated in the Seneca Falls convention of 1848, a gathering in New York that started the women's rights movement.

Consider the following …

• Why did Douglass think Congress needed to create a stronger Reconstruction policy?
• Why did Douglass describe the Southern state governments formed after the Civil War, under President Johnson's Reconstruction plan, as "shams?"
• What was life like for African Americans right after the Civil War? How would that change by allowing African Americans the right to vote and own land?

For More Information

"An Address to the Loyal Citizens and Congress of the United States of America Adopted by a Convention of Negroes Held in Alexandria, Virginia, from August 2 to 5, 1865." From Revolution to Reconstruction.http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/D/1851-1875/slavery/addres.htm (accessed on September 15, 2004).

Cashman, Sean Dennis. America in the Gilded Age. New York: New York University Press, 1984.

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Boston: Anti-slavery Office, 1845. Reprint, 150th anniversary ed., New York: Laurel, 1997.

Douglass, Frederick. "Reconstruction." Atlantic Monthly (1866): pp. 761–65. Also available at http://afroamhistory.about.com/library/bldouglass_reconstruction.htm (accessed on September 15, 2004).

Miller, Douglas T. Frederick Douglass and the Fight for Freedom. New York: Facts on File, 1988.

Rubio, Philip F. A History of Affirmative Action, 1619–2000. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001.

Earnest: Serious.

Solicitude: Concern.

Aspirations: Hopes.

Ardent: Passionate.

Profound: Very deep.

Manfully grappled: Forcefully addressed.

Skirmishing: Minor battling.

Avail: Be of use.

Statesmanship: Wise leadership.

Barren: Empty.

Treasure: Money.

Empire: Territory.

Merest mockery: Smallest joke.

Deliberate: Consider.

Treason: Betrayal of country.

Antagonisms: Hostilities.

Difficulty: Problem.

Despotic: Oppressive.

Municipal: Local.

Assertion: Statement.

Render: Make.

Interior: Inner area.

Spite: Regardless.

Statute-book: Law book.

Requisite: Necessary.

Termination: Ending.

Omissions: Failures.

Treacherous: Untrustworthy.

Reluctant: Hesitant.

Apostasy: Abandoning of belief.

Baseness: Meanness.

Ingratitude: Thanklessness.

Machinations: Schemes.

Halted: Stopped.

Considerable: Important.

Conceivable: Thinkable.

Emphatically: Strongly.

Radical: Drastically different (in this case, for African American rights).

Doctrines: Ideas being preached.

Expediency: Convenience.

Impartial suffrage: Unbiased voting rights.

Odious: Offensive.

Disposed of: Settled.

Ostentatiously: Grandly.

Haughtily: Arrogantly.

Denounced: Condemned.

Repudiated: Rejected.

Metaphysical: Abstract.

Theological: Religious.

Forfeited: Taken away.

Deference: Yielding.

Illegitimate: Unlawful.

Sham: Fake.

Malign: Evil.

Impositions: Forced frauds.

Supplanted: Replaced.

Legitimate: Lawful.

Intimated: Implied.

Condition: Requirement.

Prescience: Foresight.

Emancipated: Freed.

Dullest: Stupidest.

Sternly: Firmly.

Enfranchisement: Voting rights (for African Americans).

Frederick Douglass

BORN: c. February 1817 • Maryland

DIED: February 20, 1895 • Washington, D.C.

American abolitionist; writer

Frederick Douglass escaped slavery to become one of the most prominent abolitionists of his time and the first nationally known leader of African Americans. Known for fascinating audiences with his stirring, eloquent speeches, the self-taught Douglass was also a masterful writer whose autobiography is considered a classic of nineteenth century literature. In his autobiography, Douglass presents a detailed account of the cruelties of slavery, which stirred a sense of shame among American readers and furthered the abolitionists' cause. His influence even reached as far as the White House, and his arguments helped set the United States on a path toward racial equality.

"There is not a nation of the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour."

Life as a slave

Born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey in a slave cabin on Frederick Douglass. Maryland's Eastern Shore, Douglass was unsure of his birth date, but believed it was around February 1817. His father was probably the white overseer—the supervisor of slave labor—on the Wye River plantation of Edward Lloyd, where Douglass spent his early years. His mother, Harriet Bailey, did not raise him, but occasionally made a twenty-four-mile trip on foot to visit him and his grandmother. His mother died when Douglass was around seven. He was aware that he had brothers and sisters, but had no contact with them nor with the outside world until he was sold to a family named Auld. This occurred when Douglass was around nine years old. At that time, he was sent to live at the Auld home in Baltimore, Maryland. Conditions improved for Douglass while he lived in the city, for most urban dwellers thought it was uncivilized to beat slaves or starve them.

Douglass later wrote in his memoirs that it was during his childhood that he first heard older slaves tell stories about how their parents had been kidnapped from a place called Africa. He also learned that there were two kinds of states in America, free and slave. Auld's wife, Sophia, was originally from one of the free states, where slavery was not practiced. She treated Douglass much differently than other whites did. She regularly read aloud from the Bible, and Douglass listened with interest. When he expressed a desire to read the Bible, Sophia began teaching him the basics of reading and writing. When Auld found out, he ordered his wife to stop immediately. Teaching a slave to read or write was illegal; Douglass was fascinated by this piece of information when he learned it. He managed to continue on his own in secret, though, often by bribing white playmates to give him a lesson. By the time he was thirteen, he had saved enough money to buy an anthology of speeches and writings dating back to the ancient Greeks and Romans.

Douglass was sent back to the Eastern Shore around 1833, after some ownership disputes among the Auld family. His new owners were more typically cruel. They felt that "Fred," as he was called, was not as obedient and respectful of whites as they thought he should be, so they sent him to a local "slave-breaker." By this point Douglass was a tall, solidly built sixteen year old, and did not take well to the frequent beatings and starvation that he experienced as part of the slave-breaking. One day, he fought back, and the battle lasted two hours. Douglass called this a turning point in his life. "After resisting him, I felt as I had never felt before," he recalled in My Bondage and My Freedom (1855). "It was a resurrection from the dark and pestiferous [morally and socially harmful] tomb of slavery, to the heaven of comparative freedom. I was no longer a servile [submissive] coward…. I had reached the point, at which I was not afraid to die. This spirit made me a freeman in fact, while I remained a slave in form."

Douglass escapes

After the Aulds had hired Douglass out to the new master, he made his first attempt to escape. Unsuccessful, he was sent back to Baltimore. At this point, as punishment he might have been sold to a new owner in the Deep South, where escape to freedom was almost impossible because it was so far from the free states of the north. However, he was fortunate to learn a trade instead. For two years he worked as a caulker in Baltimore's shipyards, where he made the seams of ships watertight. He would then hand over his wages to Auld. He met a free black woman, Anna Murray, and she sold some of her belongings to help him raise the money necessary to try a more serious escape attempt. On a Monday in September 1838, Douglass put on a sailor's uniform and carried borrowed papers that claimed he was a free black, and simply boarded a train. He eventually made his way to New York City, where Anna soon joined him. An organization that aided fugitive, or escaped, slaves arranged for their marriage ceremony and then for them to travel on to New Bedford, Massachusetts. After this point, he took the surname Douglass.

New Bedford was a thriving seaport and the center of the New England whaling industry. It also had a well-established, even modestly prosperous, community of former slaves and free blacks. Douglass usually hid the fact that he was an escaped slave because he didn't want to be captured and returned to bondage. He later wrote that he nearly gave himself away when his co-workers at the wharf saw that he had difficulty counting money by himself. He began reading the Liberator, the abolitionist newspaper published by William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879) in Massachusetts, and he started attending antislavery meetings.

In summer 1841, at an abolitionist gathering on the nearby island of Nantucket, Douglass described his own personal experiences as a slave. It was the first time he had ever spoken in public. In his memoirs, he recalled that he had been very nervous and did even not remember what he said at the podium. His audience was greatly moved by his story, however, and leaders of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society offered him a regular role as a lecturer. His firsthand account of slavery's cruelties were shocking, and Douglass proved so expressive and well-spoken that a group of Harvard College students urged him to write his autobiography. The 125 pages that became the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave were published in 1845 by the American Anti-Slavery Office. He later revised and expanded it into two other volumes of memoirs.

Breaks with Garrison

His slave narrative was well read among abolitionist circles and caused somewhat of a stir among Americans who had not yet decided how they felt about slavery. Though many Northerners disliked the idea of slavery, some held racial prejudices and thought that blacks were an inferior race and probably best suited for manual labor and nothing more. However, through his forceful yet eloquent writing, Douglass proved that education could transform any person, even someone who came from the poorest of beginnings. The publication of his story attracted much attention and revealed enough details about his past in Maryland to alert the

Sojourner Truth

Like Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth was a former slave who rose to prominence as an abolitionist and wrote a well-received memoir of her former life in bondage. Born around 1797 in Ulster, New York, she was originally named Isabella Baumfree or Bomefree. She was bought and sold several times, but spent her earliest years on an estate owned by Dutch immigrants, and so Dutch was her first language. As a young woman, she married another slave, Thomas, and began a family.

Three of Truth's five children were sold away. She learned that slaves in New York State who were under the age of forty were to be freed in 1827, but when her owner told her she had to serve one more year, she simply walked away from his property with her infant daughter. Taken in by a Methodist family, she was swept up by the renewal of religious enthusiasm known as the Second Great Awakening. She converted to Christianity, spent time as an outreach worker in New York City, then lived on a commune in nearby Ossining. A commune is a community where like minded individuals live, work, and share collective resources.

Truth said that she often experienced religious visions and voices. In 1843 one message told her to change her name to Sojourner Truth. "Sojourner" refers to someone who is a temporary resident or just passing through. She began preaching as a traveling minister and spent time at another commune in Massachusetts, where she met abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Her life story was published in 1850 as Narrative of Sojourner Truth, one of the first slave narratives written by a woman. The book was widely read and told of the horrors of slavery. It also spoke of the sorrow felt by slaves and of their hopes for a better life.

In 1851 Truth traveled to Ohio to attend a women's rights convention. When she approached the podium to speak, some people taunted her, but she proceeded anyway. She told her audience, "I could work as much and eat as much as a man … and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?" Truth's speech moved the crowd. At the time, neither free blacks nor American women could vote, and there were dual movements to abolish slavery and grant women suffrage.

After slavery officially ended in 1865 with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the status of blacks remained in question. Some in the women's right movement hoped to push for both women's suffrage (right to vote) and full citizenship rights for blacks, too. More moderate voices on both sides kept the two issues separate, however. For a time, Truth worked with Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906) and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902), the most prominent leaders in the suffrage movement, but broke away from them when Stanton stated that she refused to support black suffrage unless women were guaranteed the right to vote first.

Truth spent her later years organizing food and clothing drives for former black Civil War soldiers and freed slaves. An estimated 1,000 mourners attended her 1883 funeral in Battle Creek, Michigan, which was said to have been the largest ever held in the city.

bounty-hunters who searched New Bedford, Boston, New York, and other cities for escaped slaves. As a result, Douglass was forced to flee the country and spent nearly two years touring Great Britain, where he promoted the abolitionist cause. His firsthand tales of the horrors of slavery, and his belief that it was an institution that corrupted everyone and everything involved in it—including the economy—made him somewhat of a celebrity there, too.

Upon learning that Auld would sell Douglass his freedom, two of his supporters paid the fee. Douglass returned to America in 1847 and announced his intention to start his own newspaper. The Massachusetts abolitionists were not pleased, since they had hoped to keep him on as a popular lecturer. Douglass moved his family to Rochester, New York, where his North Star newspaper would not be in competition with Garrison's Liberator. In Rochester, his office also served as a secret station on the Underground Railroad, the system of safe houses that helped escaped slaves travel to freedom in Canada. Douglass spent the next dozen years working with other renowned African Americans of the era, including Harriet Tubman (c. 1820–1913), the most famous leader of the Underground Railroad. He participated in the National Negro Conventions, where questions of race and the future of African Americans were debated.

At the conventions and elsewhere, Douglass began to promote a less radical, or extreme, vision of the future of the abolitionist cause. Some of his change in attitude came through his travels in Great Britain and his talks with other abolitionists there. Garrison, who was America's leading antislavery activist, often stated that the U.S. Constitution was a pro-slavery document. As such, Garrison rejected the idea of voting as a means to bring about change and called for separating the free states of the North entirely from the slave states of the South. Douglass, by contrast, had come to believe that the wording in the Constitution seemed to guarantee the rights of those who lived under it, and therefore could be interpreted as actually favoring the freeing of slaves. Furthermore, Douglass believed that Garrison's idea to dissolve the union of states would forever trap an estimated three million slaves in what would then be considered a foreign country.

When the U.S. Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, it set the nation on a course that would end in civil war a decade later. Like other abolitionists, Douglass condemned the provisions of the new law, which allowed slave owners to enter non-slave states to pursue, capture, and return escaped slaves. This meant that it would become much easier for blacks to be taken into custody as suspected runaways, even in tolerant cities of the North. Douglass predicted that if there were attempts to enforce the terms of the act in Boston, that city's streets would run with blood.

Adviser to Lincoln

On July 4, 1852, at a hall in Rochester, New York, Douglass delivered what became one of his best known speeches. In "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?," Douglass condemned the nation which had been founded on the principles of liberty and justice seventy-six years earlier. "I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this Fourth of July," he said. It was a holiday when Americans celebrated the birth of their nation, he pointed out, but for the slaves who could not help but overhear that day's music and parades, it served as "a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim…. There is not a nation of the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour."

Douglass was a supporter of the Republican Party, which had been founded in 1854 to oppose the political power of the South in Washington. He campaigned for the party's 1860 candidate for president, Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865; served 1861–65). Lincoln's win set in motion the final series of events that launched the American Civil War (1861–65), a conflict between the Union (the North) and the Confederacy (the South).

During the war, Douglass continued to publish his newspaper, but Lincoln requested his help in recruiting free blacks and former slaves for the Union Army. This came after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation (1863), which freed the slaves in the southern rebel states. One of its provisions also declared that former slaves were eligible for military service. Some 200,000 blacks joined to help the Union Army defeat the South. Douglass traveled throughout the North, speaking to black groups and urging the formation of regiments. Two of his sons joined the 54th Massachusetts, a black regiment led by white officers. Douglass later halted his work when he learned that the army was paying black solders less than their white counterparts.

Lincoln later asked Douglass to serve as an adviser on his 1864 reelection campaign, to which he agreed after some hesitation. Douglass had become worried that despite the Emancipation Proclamation, the final end for slavery was coming too slowly. He thought the Lincoln administration was stalling on some important points, particularly on the question of whether to recognize blacks as full citizens of the United States and grant them the same rights given to whites. The controversy over slavery in America remained a divisive and deadly one, and Lincoln was assassinated in April 1865. His successor, Andrew Johnson (1808–1875; served 1865–69), met with Douglass to discuss black suffrage (the right to vote), which came with the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Ratified on February 3, 1870, it gave all U.S. male citizens the right to vote, regardless of race. In practice, however, many African Americans would be denied the right to vote until the 1960s.

During the next twenty-five years of his life, Douglass remained a prominent and influential figure in African American political life. An entire generation of freed slaves and their children viewed him as the hero who fought for their lives in Washington and overseas, after breaking his own chains of bondage. In the post-Civil War Reconstruction Era (1865–77), he launched another newspaper, this one with his sons. The New National Era, as it was called, began publication in 1870. Douglass also held some historic federal appointments, becoming the first black to become a U.S. marshal as well as the first recorder of deeds for the District of Columbia. His family had relocated to Washington, D.C., in 1872 after their Rochester home was damaged in what appeared to be a case of arson. He also held diplomatic posts in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. He died February 20, 1895.

Douglass remained convinced all his life that education was the quickest path to freedom and prosperity. He never forgot how his own first opportunity to learn how to read had been taken away so abruptly. Douglass once wrote a letter to his former owner, on the anniversary of his liberation. Douglass reminded the slave owner that he had at least three sisters and one brother that Auld still owned. Douglass said in his letter that he would like to write to them, too, but because they were unable to read or write, this was impossible. "You have kept them in utter ignorance, and have therefore robbed them of the sweet enjoyments of writing or receiving letters from absent friends and relatives," he told Auld in the letter, which was included in My Bondage and My Freedom. "Your wickedness and cruelty, committed in this respect on your fellow-creatures, are greater than all the stripes [scars from whippings] you have laid upon my back or theirs."

For More Information

BOOKS

Douglass, Frederick. My Bondage and My Freedom. New York: Miller, Orton and Mulligan, 1855. Reprint, New York: Penguin Putnam, 2003.

Truth, Sojourner. Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave, Emancipated from Bodily Servitude by the State of New York, in 1828. Boston: Printed for author, 1850.

PERIODICALS

Clift, Eleanor. "'And Ain't I a Woman?': The Road to Female Suffrage Was Tough, But So Was Sojourner Truth." Newsweek (November 3, 2003): p. 58.

McPherson, James M. "Frederick Douglass." New Republic (March 11, 1991): p. 37.

WEB SITES

Douglass, Frederick. "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" Douglass: Archives of American Public Address. http://douglassarchives.org/doug_a10.htm (accessed on June 30, 2006).

"The Life of Frederick Douglass." U.S. National Park Service. http://www.nps.gov/frdo/fdlife.htm (accessed on June 30, 2006).

"This Far by Faith: Sojourner Truth." Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). http://www.pbs.org/thisfarbyfaith/people/sojourner_truth.html (accessed on June 30, 2006).

Truth, Sojourner. "Ain't I a Woman?" Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/anna/tg_sojourner.html (accessed on June 30, 2006).

Frederick Douglass

Born c. February 1817
Easton, Maryland

Died February 20, 1895
Washington, D.C.

Writer and activist

"Rebellion has been subdued, slavery abolished, and peace proclaimed, and yet our work is not done.… We are face to face with the same old enemy of liberty and progress."

Frederick Douglass was an eloquent spokesperson for abolition (the end of slavery) and equality. He persevered through an early life of slavery to become a celebrated speaker and writer. Relating his experiences as a victim of cruelty, Douglass maintained a strongly moral conviction in undoing the evil of slavery and establishing equality for people of both sexes and all races. He wrote celebrated autobiographical works, beginning with Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), and founded newspapers, including the North Star in 1847. The masthead of the North Star featured the motto, "Right is of no sex. Truth is of no color. God is the Father of us all, and we are all Brethren." During the Reconstruction era (1865–77), Douglass was a leader in supporting passage of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, which extended voting rights to African American males, and the efforts of Congress to ensure protection of the rights of freedmen.

Born into slavery

Frederick Douglass was born into slavery with the name Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey. His birth is generally considered to have occurred in February 1817. He took the surname Douglass (after a character in Sir Walter Scott's poem "Lady of the Lake") following his escape from slavery. Born on a farm near Easton, Maryland, Douglass was the son of a slave, Harriet Bailey, and an unidentified white man. He had a difficult childhood, separated from his mother and victimized by the cruelty of a violent slave master, Captain Anthony. Upon Anthony's death, ownership of Douglass fell to Anthony's daughter and son-in-law, Lucretia and Thomas Auld. When he was nine, Douglass was sent to Baltimore, Maryland, to be a house servant to Thomas Auld's brother, Hugh Auld, and his wife Sophia.

Douglass's main responsibility in the Hugh Auld home was to care for their child, Tommy. Sophia Auld read aloud from the Bible, and Douglass asked her to teach him to read. Sophia was enthused about teaching Douglass, but when Hugh Auld learned what his wife was doing he immediately made her stop. It was unlawful to teach a slave to read, and Auld believed that keeping slaves from reading and writing was a way to maintain power over them. Douglass realized that reading and writing was a way to freedom. He continued his education through interaction with people—by questioning and listening to them—and by reading anything he could. Sometimes he traded his food for a newspaper or a book. By age thirteen, he was reading abolitionist newspapers.

Douglass was returned to the farm at age fifteen, and he was again subjected to cruelty and beatings. At sixteen, he fought back against a whipping and earned a measure of power. He plotted an escape with a group of slaves when he was nineteen, but their plans were exposed and the slaves were jailed. Douglass returned to the Auld household in Baltimore, where he trained as a caulker (one who seals the hull of a boat to keep water from seeping in). After Douglass was beaten by white workers, Auld transferred him to his own shipbuilding business, where Douglass earned regular wages.

In his little spare time from work, Douglass met with a group of free and educated African Americans and was admitted by them to the East Baltimore Mental Improvement Society. During meetings of this organization, Douglass learned how to be a political debater and met a free African American woman named Anna Murray. They were engaged in 1838.

Determined to win his freedom above all else, Douglass risked everything he had by traveling in disguise by train from Baltimore to Philadelphia and on to New York City. If caught, he could be jailed, killed, or sold to slave masters. On September 4, 1838, he reached New York City safely.

Famous speaker and writer

After roaming New York City streets for a few days, Douglass met an African American sailor, who introduced him to a member of the Underground Railroad—a secret group of Northerners who helped runaway slaves escape to safety. Anna Murray joined Douglass in New York and they were married on September 15, 1838. They moved to a safe haven in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and lived for a time in the home of a prosperous African American family. Douglass resumed work as a caulker.

Douglass quickly became involved with abolitionist groups and read the Liberator, an abolitionist newspaper founded by William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879). "The paper became my meat and drink," Douglass once recalled. "My soul was set all on fire." He attended a convention of the Massachusetts Antislavery Society, in Nantucket, Massachusetts, in 1841, and was invited to speak. His skills as an orator were so well received that he was invited to become an activist with the group. He met Garrison, who employed him as a speaker to tell his life story and help sell copies of the Liberator. In 1843, Douglass participated in the Hundred Conventions project, the American Anti-Slavery Society's six-month tour of meeting halls throughout the west. During travels to towns and cities from Maine to Indiana, Douglass suffered mistreatment and inequality, but persevered to get his message across.

Ironically, Douglass was so eloquent that increasing numbers of people began to question whether he had actually experienced the incidents he related. Such responses, in part, motivated Douglass to write his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845). Recounting Douglass's life experiences in a strong moral tone against the evils of slavery on victim and victimizer, the book was an instant sensation. Widely popular in the North and in Europe, the Narrative also put Douglass in danger: As a fugitive slave, he had no legal protection if slave owner Thomas Auld were to seize him as Auld's property. Douglass decided to travel to England, which had emancipated (freed) all slaves within the British Empire.

Douglass enjoyed traveling for nearly two years in Britain. Friends in England collected money to buy him out of slavery from Thomas Auld. Although Douglass did not agree with the action—since he did not believe one man could own another, he should not pay for his freedom—he accepted the offer. He returned to the United States in 1847 to his wife and four children, and the family moved to Rochester, New York, where Douglass bought a house. He set up a printing shop and started his own newspaper, the North Star. Featuring articles on abolition and equality, the North Star was published under the motto, "Right is of no sex. Truth is of no color. God is the Father of us all, and we are all Brethren." Meanwhile, as a participant of the Underground Railroad, he helped more than four hundred slaves reach freedom through his printing shop.

Douglass also became politically active in his fight for equality and the abolishment of slavery. He campaigned against labor discrimination and racial segregation on public transportation; attended the landmark Women's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, and signed the first Declaration of Women's Rights, which was drafted at the convention; and he angrily opposed the Compromise of 1850, a series of bills that included the Fugitive Slave Law, which provided strong legal support for slave owners to pursue runaway slaves in nonslave states. In 1854, Douglass supported the formation of the Republican Party to oppose frequent compromises made by Congress to powerful Southern legislators on issues related to slavery.

Douglass's increasing activism put him at odds with his longtime friend, William Lloyd Garrison, who preferred a more peaceful means for ending slavery. Douglass met on several occasions with John Brown (1800–1859), an abolitionist who preached violence against slave owners. When Brown and a small band of followers were captured in an assault on an arsenal (collection of weapons) in Harper's Ferry, Virginia (now in West Virginia), hoping to take weapons and use them to arm slaves, Douglass was accused by Virginia governor Henry A. Wise (1806–1876) of being a conspirator. Douglass fled to Canada and then returned to Great Britain, where he enjoyed a successful lecture tour.

After returning to the United States, Douglass threw his support in the election of 1860 to Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865; served 1861–65). When the Civil War (1861–65) began shortly after Lincoln took office, Douglass was disappointed that Lincoln's first priority in ending the war was to save the Union, not to abolish slavery (though Lincoln was against slavery). Douglass's political activism focused on two goals: emancipation of slaves and inclusion of African Americans in the Union army. The Emancipation Proclamation announced by Lincoln in 1863 was a major step toward ending slavery and it opened up military opportunities for African Americans. Douglass's sons, Lewis and Charles, were among the first African Americans to enlist in the Union army, and Douglass actively recruited African Americans for the Union cause. He stopped recruiting, however, because segregation was being practiced by the military.

More battles after the war

The Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, abolishing slavery, became law in 1865, but Douglass's life work was not complete. "Slavery is not abolished," he said, "until the black man has the ballot." He focused on voting rights and civil rights throughout the Reconstruction era, speaking around the country in late 1865 and then again beginning in the spring of 1866. In February 1866, Douglass met with President Andrew Johnson (1808–1875; served 1865–69; see entry), but Johnson dominated the discussion by insisting he would not use his federal powers to pursue voting rights or interfere with states in civil rights issues. In 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, granting citizenship to all people born in the United States.

In 1870, Douglass and his sons began publishing a weekly newspaper, New National Era, that supported President Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885; served 1869–77; see entry) and the aggressive protection of African American rights by many Republicans in Congress. That same year, the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, extending voting rights to African American males. Section 1 of the amendment stated, "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."

The following year, Grant appointed Douglass assistant secretary of the commission of inquiry to Santo Domingo (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic). Douglass toured Santo Domingo from January through March 1871 and defended the president's failed attempt to annex the island. Douglass moved to Washington, D.C., in 1872 after his Rochester home was destroyed by fire. Copies of his newspapers and personal letters were lost in the blaze, and Douglass suspected arson.

Frederick Douglass on Reconstruction

The excerpt below is taken from "Reconstruction," an article written by Frederick Douglass and published in the December 1866 issue of Atlantic Monthly magazine. The article was timed with the return of Congress to session. Douglass wanted Congress to act on Reconstruction in much more forceful ways than President Andrew Johnson. Johnson is mentioned in the final paragraph of the excerpt.

Slavery, like all other great systems of wrong, founded in the depths of human selfishness, and existing for ages, has not neglected its own conservation. It has steadily exerted an influence upon all around it favorable to its own continuance. And to-day it is so strong that it could exist, not only without law, but even against law. Custom, manners, morals, religion, are all on its side everywhere in the South; and when you add the ignorance and servility of the ex-slave to the intelligence and accustomed authority of the master, you have the conditions, not out of which slavery will again grow, but under which it is impossible for the Federal government to wholly destroy it, unless the Federal government be armed with despotic power, to blot out State authority, and to station a Federal officer at every crossroad. This, of course, cannot be done, and ought not even if it could. The true way and the easiest way is to make our government entirely consistent with itself, and give to every loyal citizen the elective franchise,—a right and power which will be ever present, and will form a wall of fire for his protection.…

Spite of the eloquence of the earnest Abolitionists—poured out against slavery during thirty years—even they must confess, that, in all the probabilities of the case, that system of barbarism would have continued its horrors far beyond the limits of the nineteenth century but for the Rebellion, and perhaps only have disappeared at last in a fiery conflict, even more fierce and bloody than that which has now been suppressed.

It is no disparagement to truth, that it can only prevail where reason prevails. War begins where reason ends. The thing worse than rebellion is the thing that causes rebellion. What that thing is, we have been taught to our cost. It remains now to be seen whether we have the needed courage to have that cause entirely removed from the Republic. At any rate, to this grand work of national regeneration and entire purification Congress must now address Itself, with full purpose that the work shall this time be thoroughly done.…

If time was at first needed, Congress has now had time. All the requisite materials from which to form an intelligent judgment are now before it. Whether its members look at the origin, the progress, the termination of the war, or at the mockery of a peace now existing, they will find only one unbroken chain of argument in favor of a radical policy of reconstruction. For the omissions of the last session, some excuses may be allowed. A treacherous President stood in the way; and it can be easily seen how reluctant good men might be to admit an apostasy [defection] which involved so much of baseness and ingratitude. It was natural that they should seek to save him by bending to him even when he leaned to the side of error. But all is changed now. Congress knows now that it must go on without his aid, and even against his machinations.

In March 1874, Douglass assumed the presidency of the Freedman's Savings and Trust Company. He had been offered the position back in July 1867 by President Johnson, but Douglass was concerned about being associated with Johnson, who showed little interest in causes for which Douglass fought. The Freedman's Bureau was founded to help freedmen with their savings and to provide loans. By 1874, the bank was in financial trouble and Douglass, despite infusing some of his own money, was not able to save it. Douglass returned to the lecture circuit, advocating further support and extension of civil rights, campaigning for Republicans, and introducing other topics that interested him, including Scandinavian folklore. He often encountered discrimination in restaurants and while lodging and using mass transportation, and always followed up with a letter of protest to local newspapers describing each incident.

After the Reconstruction era

When Rutherford B. Hayes (1822–1893; served 1877–81; see entry) became president in March 1877, he appointed Douglass as U.S. marshal of Washington, D.C., a first for an African American. He enjoyed working in city administration and purchased a 15-acre estate in the area. Douglass called it Cedar Hill and frequently entertained family members and friends. In 1881, Douglass was appointed recorder of deeds for Washington, D.C., by President James A. Garfield (1831– 1881; served 1881). Later that year, Douglass published The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, an expanded version of his autobiography.

Douglass's wife, Anna, died in 1882. Two years later, he married Helen Pitts, his secretary. Pitts was white, and the interracial marriage was controversial to many whites and African Americans. Douglass countered that his marriage was an example that the races could coexist peacefully. The couple went on a lengthy honeymoon in Europe. Douglass campaigned for the election of Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901; served 1889–93) in 1888 and was appointed minister and counsel general to Haiti when Harrison took office. Douglass left the position in 1891 and lived in semiretirement. He still spoke out on causes he believed in and emphasized the power of voting as a means for effective change. After giving a speech on February 20, 1895, at the National Council of Women, Douglass suffered a heart attack later that evening and died at the age of seventy-seven.

Mourners gathered at a church in Washington, D.C., where he lay in state, and black public schools closed for the day. Douglass's body was taken back to Rochester, where he was laid to rest.

For More Information

Books

Blight, David W. Frederick Douglass' Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989.

Douglass, Frederick. Escape from Slavery. Edited by Michael McCurdy. New York: Knopf, 1994.

Douglass, Frederick. The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. Hartford, CT: Park Publishing, 1881. Reprint, Grand Rapids, MI: Candace Press, 1996.

Douglass, Frederick. My Bondage and My Freedom. New York: Miller, Orton and Mulligan, 1855. Reprint, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987.

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Boston: Anti-slavery Office, 1845. Reprint, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1997.

McFeeley, William S. Frederick Douglass. New York: Norton, 1991.

Russell, Sharman. Frederick Douglass. New York: Chelsea House, 1992.

Web Sites

Douglass, Frederick. "Reconstruction." The Atlantic Online.http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/black/douglas.htm (accessed on July 19, 2004).

"Frederick Douglass." Afro-American Almanac: Biographies.http://www.top-tags.com/aama/bio/men/freddoug.htm (accessed on July 19, 2004).

The Frederick Douglass Museum & Cultural Center.http://www.ggw.org/freenet/f/fdm/ (accessed on July 19, 2004).

Frederick Douglass National Historic Site.http://www.nps.gov/frdo/freddoug.html (accessed on July 19, 2004).

Douglass, Frederick 1818-1895

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Born into chattel slavery on February 14, 1818, in Tuckahoe on the eastern shores of Maryland, Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, later known as Frederick Douglass, created in his time and for future generations one of the most remarkable personalities in American history. As a public figure, Douglass rose through the brutalities of slavery to become at the time of his death on February 20, 1895, the most famous black American in the world and black America’s foremost intellectual voice.

Douglass’s preeminence in American history is gleaned from his direct contacts with the antebellum abolitionist leadership of William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879), the suffragist leadership of Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906) and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902), the militancy of John Brown (1800–1859) and Martin Delany (1812–1885), his meetings with U.S. presidents from Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) to James Garfield (1831–1881), and his government assignments as U.S. representative to the Dominican Republic and Haiti. However, there is a private side, of which too little is made, to Douglass’s determination to engage the forces of evil, as he saw them, and to form alliances only when it was necessary for him to be heard by more people, read by more citizens, or at times, to present himself to another country, as he did on several occasions on his visits to the British Isles.

Douglass escaped from slavery in 1838. As his biographers have noted, in 1841 the former slave joined the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society under the leadership of Garrison, then leader of the radical wing of abolitionism and editor of the successful abolitionist newspaper, the Liberator. Douglass clearly modeled some of his behavior on Garrison. Both recognized the fiery spirit in each other, and both were orators connected by a passion to eliminate slavery. Through Garrison’s group, Douglass earned money as a speaker, widened his circle of abolitionist acquaintances, and traveled to new places. The most compelling event in 1845 from an abolitionist’s perspective was the publication of Douglass’s first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. Garrison, in fact, wrote the preface. Douglass later wrote My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), and in 1881 he published Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, his final autobiography.

The Narrative made Douglass famous and started a long and distinguished career for this brave man, prolific writer, and articulate democratic voice. In page after page, he details the painful and violent experiences slaves faced as they were raped, murdered, bought, and sold away from their families. Douglass not only named the murdered, he named the murderers who went unpunished as well, thus providing graphic proof that no law protected slaves against these crimes. Furthermore, his writing critiqued the structure of authority by slicing through the rhetoric of the state to expose slaveholders, especially those professing religious faith, in their role as personal agents in a system of slavery allowed to exist simultaneously with the ideals of a free republic. The Narrative established him as a reliable and serious source for presenting any of the issues of his day requiring instruction and correction, most of them related to slavery.

By 1847, as the editor of the second black-owned newspaper in the United States, the North Star, Douglass had found that the uses of history enabled him to move back and forth between his private and public worlds. Douglass’s use of history permitted him to speak about the signs of the times; it served, furthermore, to help him to judge civilization’s behaviors for failing to subject the nation’s moral faults to critical reflection. In this way, Douglass used history to critique reason. For him, the realities of slavery placed the present and the future of the United States in an untenable position: The country could not survive if it remained both slave and free. The purpose of Douglass’s legacy to America and to the world is to uphold the principle of freedom as an inalienable human right.

Although supportive of each other, Douglass and Garrison split over the issue of the Constitution as a document that supported the institution of slavery. As early as 1851, the relationship between the two became strained as Douglass, having studied the debate over the Constitution, rejected Garrison’s position that the Constitution was proslavery, whereas Douglass gradually saw the document as having the potential to eradicate slavery. Biographers have portrayed the breakup in Freudian terms as Douglass’s rejection of Garrison as a father figure and his search for his own identity. It is also important to note that freedom for Douglass encompassed a deep, multilayered view of the self that had more to do with being “self-made” than with being a collaborator. His understanding of the Constitution, ultimately, had less to do with what Garrison asserted than with what Douglass realized through his own complex social and historical understanding of the place of all humankind, black and white, male and female, in a democratic social order.

Having been a slave, Douglass instinctively understood the political rights of women. Their demand for equal citizenship and the right to vote found him using his considerable oratorical gifts and intellect on their behalf. As one of the few men to attend the 1848 convention on the rights of women in Seneca Falls, New York, the editor of the North Star added to the masthead of the paper his now-famous conviction, formed at this political gathering: Right is of no sex; truth is of no color; God is the father of us all and we are all brethren. He understood that the criticisms leveled against women in their pursuit of freedom against male supremacy were the very same arguments used against the freeing of slaves. While his dedication to women’s political rights never wavered, Douglass did not always support the feminist leadership of Anthony and Stanton. They all supported civil war, but differed on other questions; for example, Douglass supported the Fifteenth Amendment giving black men the right to vote. Anthony and Stanton did not support this amendment because it did not offer the same rights to women.

In 1882 Frederick Douglass, now sixty-four-years old and known as the “sage of Anacostia” after the Washington, D.C., neighborhood where he lived, buried Anna Murray Douglass, his wife of forty-five years, who had long suffered from rheumatism. It was a considerable shock to the world when in 1884 he married Helen Pitts, forty-six, a white woman from a New York abolitionist family with deep roots in radical politics. The interracial marriage eliminated any distinction between private and public worlds: It clashed with social norms. Most whites and blacks, particularly members of the couple’s own families, looked upon the marriage as a violation, and neither family fully embraced them. Nevertheless, Douglass and Pitts lived happily and traveled to the great cities of Europe and to Egypt. After his death, and in the face of opposition from his children, she lectured and secured donations to preserve Cedar Hill, their home in Anacostia. The couple is buried in the family plot in Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, New York.

SEE ALSO Slavery

BIBLIOGRAPHY

McFeely, William. 1991. Frederick Douglass. New York: Norton.

Quarles, Benjamin. [1948] 1968. Frederick Douglass. New York: Atheneum.

C. James Trotman