INTRODUCTION

A Life of Reform

In March 1895, the twenty-seven year-old, newly appointed professor at Wilberforce College in Ohio, W. E. B. DuBois, was invited to address a campus service commemorating the recent death of Frederick Douglass. DuBois had heard Douglass speak only once, but like most African Americans of his generation, he was very familiar with his exploits. He eulogized Douglass as a true statesman, “a man who being in a position to lead, leads.” DuBois singled out Douglass’s accomplishments: a powerful voice for the abolition of slavery, a successful lobbyist for the enlistment of black soldiers in the Civil War, and an uncompromising champion of the enfranchisement and equal rights of the freedmen. DuBois then attempted to define the lessons of that career for future generations: “As an advocate of civil rights Frederick Douglass stood outside mere race lines and placed himself upon the broad basis of humanity…. In this stand the best thought of the 19th century in all the world is with us; and as long as we keep to this broad principle—as long as we condemn lynching men, & not merely condemn lynching Negroes, so long shall we continue slowly but surely to approach the goal which this our Moses placed before us.”1

Another rising black leader, Booker T. Washington, also attempted to define the lessons of Douglass’s life for African Americans born after emancipation: “What he himself was, he had gained by hard work, consecration, temperate habits, and God-fearing conduct toward all of his fellows…. Mr. Douglass had richly earned everything that he had, and those who took him as a model were made to realize that success does not come as a gift, but must be deserved and won as a reward for right thinking and high living.” For Washington, Douglass was the personification of his own ideology that personal improvement rather than political engagement was the best means for young blacks to advance.2

The differing emphases of DuBois’s and Washington’s interpretations of Douglass’s historical significance persisted throughout the next century. During the modern civil rights era, a rancorous debate occurred about the relevance of Douglass’s example for solving the racial problems of the nation. He was touted as a champion of nonviolent as well as militant protest by such competing spokespersons for the 1960s civil rights movement as James Foreman, Stokely Carmichael, and Angela Davis. Although for decades Douglass had been held up as a symbol of race pride, many black nationalists of that decade faulted his dedication to integration and other radicals branded his faith in individual economic achievement as naive.3 Malcolm X combined both critiques and, while conceding Douglass’s greatness, advised that black children would be better off being taught about leaders such as Toussaint L’Ouverture, the Haitian revolutionary, “who fought, who bled for freedom, and made others bleed.”4

In this new century, Douglass remains an enduring political and cultural symbol, but like some other figures of times long passed such as Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Susan B. Anthony, John Brown, or even Robert E. Lee, a separation seems to grow inevitably between the iconic figure and his or her actual historical record.5 With an individual such as Douglass who left a vast amount of public pronouncements, including speeches, editorials, correspondence, and three autobiographies, it seems possible to selectively quote him in support of dozens of contradictory positions. Therefore a brief examination of Douglass’s life will be useful to demonstrate that he was a serious thinker, deeply engaged in both the political debates and intellectual currents of his time. Although DuBois’s Douglass did “lead,” he also observed, analyzed, reflected, and reconsidered his views on multiple issues throughout the nineteenth century. To fully understand Douglass’s public statements, it is essential that they be placed within the context his remarkable life story.

Slave Child

Thanks largely to his own autobiographical writings and the dedicated work of his biographers, the details of Frederick Douglass’s life are better known than those of any other nineteenth-century African American. He was born on a tobacco plantation on the eastern shore of Maryland and given the name Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey. His mother Harriet was a slave, but his grandmother Betsy Bailey raised him. Soon after Douglass’s birth, Harriet was hired out to work on another farm, and she could visit her son only infrequently. Her mother Betsy Bailey was a strong woman, proud of a lineage that she could trace back several generations to a slave “Baly,” imported from the West Indies but perhaps born in Africa. In her remote cabin, she raised her grandson until the age of six, when she delivered him to the Wye House plantation, the ancestral base of the powerful Lloyd family. Without advanced warning, Betsy left young Frederick at Wye House and never saw him again as a child, thus ending, according to Nathan I. Huggins, Douglass biographer, “his only real attachment to family.”6

Wye House—Entrance Front. Z24.565VF. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society.

Douglass’s owner was Aaron Anthony, the Lloyd’s principal overseer. Anthony, who some believed was his father, put the boy to work assisting his cook. While still a child, Douglass, hiding in a closet, witnessed Anthony sadistically whip his aunt Hester. He later graphically recounted this and many other inhumane attacks as regular features of slave life on the Lloyd plantation. In contrast, Anthony often indulged young Douglass and allowed him to serve as a companion of one of the Lloyd’s male children. The two roamed the forests and swamps, with the young Lloyd shooting game and Douglass retrieving it. Through his contact with the Lloyds, Douglass had a glimpse of an affluent lifestyle far beyond the imaginings of most slaves. As a boy, he sat on the banks of the Chesapeake Bay and dreamed of a better life while watching ships sail by on their way to the far corners of the world. In later antislavery speeches and in his autobiographies, Douglass often recounted details of these early experiences. Not only did he describe his own treatment in order to condemn the inherent inhumanity of the institution of slavery, but he also extolled the importance of family relationships that he had known briefly, if at all.

A significant turning point in Douglass’s life came in 1826 when Anthony “loaned” the young slave to his daughter’s brother-in-law, Hugh Auld. Auld was a Baltimore shipwright who wanted the young slave as companion for his own son, “Tommy,” and as a helper around the house for his wife, Sophia Auld, who had never before had a slave under her control. According to Dickson Preston, Douglass biographer, “she could no more treat him as an inferior than one of her own children.”7 Sophia Auld even began to teach the black youth to read. When her husband discovered this, he ordered these lessons ended, declaring, as Douglass recalled, “learning would do him no good, but probably, a great deal of harm—making him disconsolate and unhappy. If you learn him now to read, he’ll want to know how to write; and, this accomplished, he’ll be running away with himself.”8 If anything, Auld’s opposition encouraged Douglass to become literate. He bribed local school children with sweets stolen from the Auld’s kitchen to continue his education until he had mastered reading.

At some point in his Baltimore youth, Douglass acquired a copy of Caleb Bingham’s textbook on English grammar and rhetoric, the Columbia Orator, first published in 1797. This work contained excerpts from speeches by such famous orators as Cicero, William Pitt, and Charles James Fox. Not only did these men’s words serve as models that inspired the young Douglass to enter public life, but also an essay on oratorical skills added by Bingham influenced his later speaking style. William McFeely, Douglass biographer, has observed that Douglass took to heart Bingham’s analysis of Cicero: “The best judges of the ancients have represented Pronunciation, which they likewise called Action, as the principal part of an orator’s province.” According to McFeely, Douglass thereafter believed that if “he could say words—say them correctly, say them beautifully, [he] could act; he could matter in the world.”9 Much of the striving for eloquent expression that marked Douglass’s speeches can be traced to his absorption of Bingham’s lessons.

By 1833, Aaron Anthony had died and Douglass became the property of Anthony’s son-in-law, Thomas Auld, a storekeeper in the small village of St. Michaels, back on the Maryland eastern shore. After a quarrel between the Auld brothers, Thomas Auld had the fifteen-year-old slave returned to him at St. Michaels. Douglass found the routines of village life boring after having lived in Baltimore. He got into serious trouble for attempting to operate a clandestine Sunday school for local blacks. To instill more discipline in this overindulged slave, Auld “hired out” Douglass to work for a year on the farm of the most notorious “slave breaker” in the area, Edward Covey. Determined to make him a more pliant slave, Covey underfed and overworked the young man. Escalating tensions between the two culminated in a brutal two-hour-long showdown in August 1834 in which Douglass successfully resisted all attempts by Covey to tie and whip him. Douglass later recalled,

After resisting him [Edward Covey], I felt as I had never felt before. It was a resurrection from the dark and pestiferous tomb of slavery, to the heaven of comparative freedom. I was no longer a servile coward, trembling under the form of a brother worm of the dust, but, my long-cowed spirit was roused to an attitude of manly independence. 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.10

Waldo Martin, historian, judges this fight as “the most important event in Douglass’s journey from thralldom to liberty. It graphically heralded his lifelong dedication to resistance against oppression.”11 Douglass did not define that “manly independence” in contrast to feminine traits; rather, he identified manhood in terms of freedom contrasted with enslavement. In future years, this identification enabled him to vigorously support the women’s rights movement while still behaving as a proper Victorian in his own domestic relations.

The following year, Auld hired out Douglass to work on the farm owned by a less violent master, William Freeland. Although Douglass never complained of his treatment by Freeland, he had grown more desirous than ever of obtaining his freedom. He plotted with four other slaves to steal a small boat and sail North to freedom. A fellow slave probably exposed their conspiracy, and all were arrested and jailed. As the ringleader, Douglass expected to be made an example and “sold South” to the distant cotton fields of Alabama or Mississippi. Instead, Thomas Auld decided to give his slave one last chance and returned him to live with his brother’s family in Baltimore. Auld even promised to free Douglass at age twenty-five if he behaved obediently.

Douglass has left eloquent testimony about his treatment as a young slave. He reflected often on the distorted values and behaviors of the slaveholders he had encountered. Although he was not physically abused to the extent that many slaves were, the scenes of brutality the youthful Douglass witnessed allowed him to condemn the system of human bondage as fundamentally antithetical to human rights. His opportunity to become literate in the Auld’s Baltimore household instilled in him an appreciation for education and self-improvement that became a lifelong theme in his oratory and writing.12

The Runaway Slave

Hugh Auld put the teenage Douglass to work on the Baltimore docks. In time, Douglass acquired valued skills as a ship caulker although he had to endure racially motivated attacks from white coworkers. With his labor rented out to various shipbuilding companies, he generated considerable revenue for Auld. Perhaps to motivate Douglass to work even harder and out of his own arrogance as a slave owner, Auld allowed the slave to seek out his own employers and to live outside the household. Auld’s only requirement was that Douglass weekly turn over the bulk of his wages. Douglass later observed, “Master Hugh…with this arrangement…had armed my love of liberty with a lash and driver, far more efficient than any I had known before known; and, while he derived all the benefits of slaveholding by the arrangement, without its evils, I endured all the evils of being a slave, and yet suffered all the care and anxiety of a responsible freeman.”13

Free of intensive white supervision, Douglass joined a small black Methodist congregation and mixed socially with the large Baltimore free black community. In 1837 or early 1838, he met Anna Murray, a free black originally from the Eastern Shore who worked as a maid for a wealthy white family. Together, the two planned for a life in freedom. Historians have observed that Douglass’s time in Baltimore “had equipped him for a life beyond slavery, providing him with an education and socialization that was a rare privilege for a slave youth.”14

In September 1838, Douglass escaped from Auld by disguising himself as a free black sailor on shore leave. He boldly took a train to New York City where Anna rendezvoused with him, and the two were married. For greater security, the couple settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts, where they sought anonymity among the large free black population of the city. To make it harder for Auld to discover his new home, he dropped the surname “Bailey.” Originally, he had considered adopting the surname “Johnson,” but he discovered it was already too common a pseudonym among the large New Bedford population of runaway slaves. Instead, he selected “Douglass,” the name of a leading character from Sir Walter Scott’s Lady of the Lake, on account of its heroic sound. His reading now unfettered, Douglass immersed himself in the novels of Scott, the poetry of Lord Byron and Robert Burns, and the plays of William Shakespeare, all authors from whom he would quote freely in later years.15

Although residing in a free state, Douglass encountered considerable racial discrimination when he sought work in New Bedford. He had to work as a day laborer on the docks rather than a caulker due to the opposition of white artisans. He later recalled that “It was new, dirty, and hard work for me; but I went at it with a glad heart and a willing hand. I was now my own master. It was a happy moment, the rapture of which can be understood only by those who have been slaves.”16 Douglass and his wife also derived great pleasure from joining the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. Douglass became a lay preacher, and the experience as a public speaker that he gained in the church proved invaluable in his later career. In many later public speeches, he applied the biblical and other religious imagery he learned during these years to his commentary on contemporary political events.

By the time Douglass had reached the North in the later 1830s, a small but vocal campaign was underway to abolish slavery. Resistance to slavery, of course, had begun practically with the establishment of human bondage in the Americas. Slave rebels were certainly the first abolitionists and inspired others to join in the emancipation crusade. The small but growing communities of free African Americans also denounced the enslavement of their brethren. In the 1820s, most free black leaders had rallied against the efforts of the American Colonization Society to persuade them to abandon the United States for a new home in Africa.17 The testimony of these African Americans, plus the success of the campaign by British evangelicals against slavery in the British Caribbean colonies, motivated some American whites to also began to speak out against the physical and moral mistreatment of the slaves. Aided by the religious fervor of the recent Second Great Awakening, the American movement for immediate abolition had grown rapidly despite encountering major opposition from the leading U.S. political and religious institutions. In 1840, the still young abolitionist movement splintered into a number of competing factions over issues of the most effective tactics to pursue. Some favored working through the churches and others through governmental institutions to abolish slavery.18

In New England, in particular, many abolitionists followed the leadership of William Lloyd Garrison, a white journalist. These Garrisonians favored a coalition of abolitionists with other reformers pursuing such goals as women’s rights, temperance, and pacifism. Only a year out of Maryland slavery, Douglass began a subscription to Garrison’s weekly Boston newspaper, The Liberator. Douglass later reported that he found that the “Liberator was a paper after my own heart. It detested slavery—exposed hypocrisy and wickedness in high places—made no truce with the traffickers in the bodies and souls of men; it preached human brotherhood, denounced oppression, and, with all the solemnity of God’s word, demanded the complete emancipation of my race.”19 It was through reading the Liberator articles written by well-educated Garrisonian men and women that Douglass greatly expanded his knowledge of mid-nineteenth-century political and intellectual currents as well as the specific issues related to ongoing reform campaigns.20

Douglass attended some abolitionist meetings in New Bedford and heard Garrison lecture. Impressed by the abolitionist’s commitment to black rights, Douglass attended a regional abolitionist convention on the island of Nantucket in August 1841. Inspired to speak, he briefly told the audience some of his own experiences as a slave. His novice performance convinced the Garrisonians to recruit Douglass to become one of their traveling lecturers. Initially, he described only his personal experiences to curious Northern audiences, always remaining careful not to disclose details that would reveal his true identify. In a short time, however, Douglass mastered the abolitionists’ full arsenal of arguments against slavery in his speeches. His orations became so erudite that critics of the abolitionists charged that Douglass could never have been born a slave as he claimed.21 To defend his credibility, Douglass in 1845 published the first of his three autobiographies, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, which provided all of the specific details of his birth, ownership, and life in Maryland. However, to protect fugitive slaves from capture by their Southern masters, Douglass did not include details of his escape from slavery.

Contemporaries as well as modern-day scholars regard Douglass’s Narrative as one of the greatest literary works produced by the American antislavery crusade. Narrative has been quoted repeatedly, first by other abolitionists and subsequently by historians and literary scholars, for its insights on the damaging impact of slavery on both the bondsman and the master. One Irish reviewer called Narrative “a literary wonder. The incidents of his life are such a kind as to hold the reader spell-bound, while they are related in a style simple, perspicuous, and eloquent.”22 Widely accepted today as the epitome of the fugitive slave narrative genre, Douglass’s first autobiography is perhaps the most studied work of African American literature of all times.23

William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879). After daguerreotype by Lorenzo G. Chase. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution/Art Resource, N.Y.

Abolitionist Hero

His identity as a fugitive slave now public, Douglass’s friends warned him that his recapture and return to slavery was a real possibility. For his personal safety, Douglass fled to Great Britain. For nearly two years, he toured the British Isles lecturing on behalf of the abolitionist cause. He traveled through Ireland and observed the famine. After also witnessing there the evils of heavy drinking, Douglass was converted to the cause of temperance. For the next half century Douglass lectured to audiences about the deleterious consequences of alcohol consumption, branding intemperance “the parent of wretchedness, want and idleness….”24 In Scotland, he created considerable controversy by his vehement attacks on clergy there who had solicited contributions from American slaveholders. The support that many American denominations lent to slavery by accepting slave owners into their membership caused Douglass to scold religious institutions for compromising fundamental moral principles. He told an Irish audience that he “loved and cherished the sacred principles of Christianity; but he despised the man-trapping, woman-whipping, slave-branding and cradle-robbing Christianity of America….”25 Like many of his Garrisonian colleagues, he adopted a jeremiad stance in his public pronouncements, which lamented the low state that slavery had taken American morality, and prophesized divine retribution unless a sweeping reform was undertaken.26

Douglass’s enthusiastic reception in Great Britain greatly elevated his self-confidence. He was welcomed into the homes of middle-class reformers as well as the manors of titled nobility and observed the absence of racism exhibited by his hosts. Douglass’s abolitionist rhetoric thereafter denounced the hypocrisy of the democratic pretensions of his own republic compared to the civility found in the British monarchy. He spoke repeatedly on this theme over the next three decades as a principal orator at annual celebrations sponsored by African Americans to honor the British emancipation of slaves in the West Indies in the 1830s.27 In late 1846, English abolitionist sympathizers purchased his freedom from Auld and gave Douglass funds to return to the United States and start his own newspaper. Douglass left Britain, according to one study of that trip, “the finished independent man, cut from a whole cloth and able to make his own decisions about the strategies and ideologies of the abolitionist movement.”28

The founding of the North Star (later the Frederick Douglass’ Paper) in Rochester, New York, in late 1847 marked the beginning of Douglass’s personal political ideology. In his first years as an abolitionist, Douglass espoused the Garrisonian tenets that the Constitution was a proslavery document and eschewed voting as an act that endorsed a government that protected slavery. He condemned not only the two major political parties of the era, the Whigs and the Democrats, but also the small Liberty Party founded by abolitionist opponents of Garrison in 1840.29 Douglass’s speeches and North Star editorials attacked not just slavery and the racism found in Northern society but also offered incisive commentary on a wide range of contemporary social trends and cultural developments.

Prospectus for an anti-slavery paper to be entitled North Star. Schomburg Center/Art Resource, N.Y.

Even though Douglass’s writings at this time generally followed the Garrisonian line, he detected signs that many white Garrisonians disapproved of his more elevated and independent role in the movement as a newspaper editor. Offended by what he viewed as paternalism, Douglass’s loyalties began to waiver. In his editorial columns, he questioned the Garrisonian orthodoxy regarding the Constitution and wondered in print whether political means might be effective against slavery. Years later, Douglass reflected on the many intellectual benefits he had derived from taking on the responsibilities of editing his own weekly newspaper: “it was the best school possible for me. It obliged me to think and read, it taught me to express my thoughts clearly, and was perhaps better than any other course I could have adopted. Besides, it made it necessary for me to lean upon myself, and not upon the heads of our Anti-Slavery church, to be a principal, and not an agent.”30 This was the beginning of Douglass’s serious study of the government and Constitution of the United States and of the responsibilities of citizenship, all subjects on which he offered many perceptive observations over the years.

Locating operations for the North Star in upstate New York, far from the Garrisonian center of strength in New England, Douglass sought out new friends and allies. In 1848, he attended the national convention in Buffalo, New York, that founded the Free Soil Party. Although disappointed that the new party failed to call for the immediate emancipation of the slaves, Douglass gave a qualified endorsement to its platform opposing the extension of slavery into the western territories. Acknowledging the shortcomings in the Free Soilers’ positions, Douglass observed aptly that “what is morally right is not always politically possible.”31 In the early 1850s, Douglass came into closer contact with abolitionists in his new home region who supported political antislavery tactics. Their leader, Gerrit Smith, a wealthy landowner, impressed Douglass by his absence of racial condescension.32 In 1851, Douglass merged his financially struggling newspaper with a Liberty Party periodical underwritten by Smith. The move marked Douglass’s final defection from the Garrisonians to the political antislavery camp. Throughout the 1850s, Douglass wavered between support for the anti-extensionist Free Soil Party and its successor, the Republican Party, and Smith’s tiny political abolitionist faction, which claimed that the federal government had the constitutional power to abolish slavery.

Douglass’s preference for political activism led to his acrimonious expulsion from the Garrisonian abolitionist ranks. There were charges that he had been “bought” by Smith’s generous contributions. There were even nastier imputations that Douglass’s personal life was out of order. Rumors circulated that Douglass had developed an improper intimacy with his white editorial assistant, Julia Griffiths, who had come from England to help him with the North Star. Douglass came to believe that the Garrisonians’ anger toward him was largely motivated by their paternalist belief that the former fugitive slave should forever remain indebted to his original white sponsors.

In a thoughtfully prepared address in 1855 to the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, Douglass attempted to step back from the acrimony and offer a balanced assessment of the progress of American abolitionism. He praised Garrison’s leading role in organizing the antislavery movement in the early 1830s, but contended that the white abolitionist “neither discovered its principles, originated its ideas, nor framed its arguments. These are all older than the preacher.”33 Douglass traced the origins of antislavery sentiments instead back to early religious preaching, the ideology of the American Revolution, and free black resistance to the colonization movement. He then appraised the strengths and weaknesses displayed by each of the competing abolitionist factions. Conceding the damage caused by factional infighting among abolitionists, Douglass concluded his assessment of the movement on an optimistic beat: “Present organizations may perish—but the cause will go on. That cause has a life, distinct and independent of the organizations patched up from time to time to carry it forward. Looked at apart from the bones and sinews, and body, it is a thing immortal. It is the very essence of justice, Liberty, and love.”34

Facing difficult financial times with a growing family and the loss of many of his earliest Garrisonian subscribers, Douglass and Griffiths struggled to keep their antislavery newspaper afloat. Douglass traveled widely, lecturing and collecting in new subscriptions. Griffiths edited a series of gift books entitled the Liberty Bell, the proceeds from which went to Douglass’s newspaper. For the 1853 issue of the Liberty Bell, Douglass wrote a novella, “The Heroic Slave,” one of the first fictional works by an African American author. This work was a fictionalized defense of an actual shipboard slave uprising led by Madison Washington in 1841.35

In 1855, Douglass also published his second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom. This work carried on the Narrative’s assault on the mistreatment of Southern slaves but also added a lengthy indictment of the Northern racial discrimination that Douglass had endured since fleeing Maryland. In comparison to Narrative, Douglass in My Bondage and My Freedom offers deeper psychological insights into the damaging impact of plantation life on master as well as slave. McFeely observes that readers of this second autobiography “will find a Frederick Douglass of a far more critical and analytical mind than the one in the Narrative.”36 Nevertheless, the reading public, then and today, has evinced a preference for the more pristine language of Douglass’s first autobiography. Eric Sundquist, literary scholar, argues that, in the later work, Douglass’s prose had adopted an almost oratorical character: “It is exactly such language that some modern readers have found regrettable in My Bondage and My Freedom. Yet the text reminds us often that the language of revolutionary liberation and the language of sentiment are virtually synonymous, not just in the best antislavery writing but in the whole era’s grappling with the problem of bondage.”37

Portrait of Frederick Douglass, abolitionist. Engraved by J. C. Buttre from a daguerreotype.

Source: “My Bondage and My Freedom” by Frederick Douglass. New York, Auburn: Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1855. Schomburg Center/Art Resource, N.Y.

Fighting for Freedom

In the 1850s, Douglass expanded his leadership in the Northern free black community. He resisted segregation policies on ships and railroad cars at the risk of physical injury and withdrew his children from segregated schools in Rochester. Douglass attended major conventions of free blacks and strongly advocated both self-help and civil rights. He helped lead a series of campaigns in New York to win equal voting rights for black men.38 Douglass also publicly battled with other black leaders such as Martin Delany and Henry Highland Garnet, who advocated emigration back to Africa as the best course for the elevation of their race. For decades to come, Douglass articulated a consistent position in speeches and writings against all efforts to persuade African Americans to depart the United States for a new homeland.39

After she published Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852, Douglass befriended Harriet Beecher Stowe. This relationship developed gingerly because Douglass in his Heroic Slave had intentionally sought to refute the image of the passive slave embodied by Stowe’s Uncle Tom character.40 As their mutual trust grew, Douglass encouraged Stowe to offer financial support to establish a black manual arts college and abandon her endorsement of colonization schemes.41

Also during the 1850s, Douglass was an active conductor on the famous Underground Railroad. He hid runaway slaves in his own house until he was able to assist them to reach Canada, where they would be safe from recapture by their masters. Although he championed the activities of other Underground Rail conductors in his editorials and speeches, he maintained a strict silence about his own part in aiding fugitives until well after the end of slavery. He later explained this secrecy as a tactical calculation: “Such is my detestation of slavery, that I would keep the merciless slaveholder profoundly ignorant of the means of flight adopted by the slave. He should be left to imagine himself surrounded by myriads of invisible tormentors, ever ready to snatch, from his infernal grasp, his trembling prey.”42 While he hid his personal participation in the Underground Railroad, Douglass’s speeches and editorial throughout the 1850s loudly denounced the effort by the federal government to capture and return runaway slaves to the South. In 1852, for example, he declared, “In glaring violation of justice, in shameless disregard of the forms of administering law, in cunning arrangement to entrap the defenseless, and in diabolical intent, this Fugitive Slave Law stands alone in the annals of tyrannical legislation.”43

In the 1850s, Douglass also was drawn deeply into the conspiracy led by John Brown, the white abolitionist. Douglass met Brown while on an abolitionist lecture tour of Massachusetts and was impressed by the latter’s freedom from racial prejudices. Brown was searching for more aggressive means of freeing slaves and devised a plot to lead an armed band into the South via the Appalachian Mountains. Hiding in camps deep in those mountains, Brown’s followers planned to raid plantations, free slaves, and eventually foment a massive rebellion. In the mid-1850s, Brown with several sons migrated to Kansas Territory and played a well-publicized role in the guerrilla skirmishing between supporters of creating a free state there and settlers wanting a slave state.

In January 1858, Brown visited Rochester and stayed several weeks as a guest in Douglass’s home. There Brown sharpened his original plan to invade the South and attempted to recruit Douglass into the conspiracy. With a family of five children to support, Douglass rejected these entreaties but helped Brown to find supporters in both black and white abolitionist circles.44 As David Blight, historian, observes, Douglass “did not lack physical courage, he was simply too much a realist to join the Harpers Ferry raid. Douglass was also wise enough to know that rhetoric was his best weapon.”45 After Brown’s attack failed, authorities uncovered documents linking Douglass to the plot. Fearing arrest, Douglass fled first to Canada and then to Great Britain. Only after the furor died down the following year did Douglass believe it safe to return to Rochester.

For the remainder of his life, Douglass strongly championed the memory of John Brown as a martyr for freedom. He defended Brown’s employment of violent means as a justifiable response to the terror employed daily against the slaves. Douglass editorialized, “Slavery is a system of brute force. It shields itself behind might, rather than right. It must be met with its own weapons. Capt. Brown has initiated a new mode of carrying on the crusade of freedom, and his blow has sent dread and terror throughout the entire ranks of the piratical army of slavery.”46 In an 1860 speech Douglass branded slavery as “A standing insurrection from beginning to end—a perpetual chronic insurrection…. John Brown merely stepped in to interrupt and arrest this insurrection against the rights and liberties of mankind; and he did right.”47 He also praised Brown’s moral courage in challenging enormous odds: “His deeds might be disowned, but the spirit which made those deeds possible was worthy highest honor.”48

Shortly after Douglass’s return from his post–Harpers Ferry exile, the attention of the nation turned to the crisis produced by the election of Republican Party candidate, Abraham Lincoln, to the presidency. Douglass reluctantly endorsed Lincoln but criticized the weakness of the Republican platform, which opposed only the spread of slavery to the western territories.49 Eleven slaveholding states, however, believed that Lincoln in the White House was a dire threat to the institution of slavery, and they seceded. Soon the nation was plunged into a bloody civil war. Initially in his editorial columns, Douglass was critical of Lincoln for failing to make abolition the war goal of the North. Then, following the president’s issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, Douglass became an energetic supporter of Lincoln and the Union cause. In an important 1864 address entitled “The Mission of the War,” Douglass now fully endorsed the war for its goal of emancipation: “The world has witnessed many wars—and history records and perpetuates their memory, but the world has not seen a nobler and grander war than that which the loyal people of this country are now waging against the slaveholding Rebels. The blow we strike is not merely to free a country or continent—but the whole world from Slavery—for when Slavery falls here—it will fall everywhere.”50 According to Blight, Douglass’s “millennialist interpretation of the war caused him caused him to see the conflict as a cleansing tragedy, wherein the nation had been redeemed of its evil by lasting grace.”51

John Brown (1800–1859). Library of Congress.

With the antislavery goal of the war clarified, Douglass crisscrossed the North laboring as a recruiter of black soldiers. Douglass called on his fellow blacks to use military service as a way to dispel Northern white racial prejudices and as a means to lay claim to full citizenship following Union victory. In one 1863 address, he declared, “Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters U.S. let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his soldier, and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on the earth or under the earth which can deny that he has earned the right of citizenship in the United States. I say again, this is our chance, and woe betide us if we fail to embrace it!”52

Two of Douglass’s three sons joined black regiments of the Union Army and served with distinction. Douglass personally met three times with President Abraham Lincoln in Washington and advised him on the best ways to employ blacks in the military effort. In later years, Douglass recalled that Lincoln had received him graciously at the White House and listened to his recommendations respectfully. With racism increasing later in the century, Douglass reminisced, “Mr. Lincoln was not only a great President, but a GREAT MAN—too great to be small in anything. In his company, I was never in any way reminded of my humble origin, or of my unpopular color.”53

Reconstruction

The friendly treatment by Lincoln, coupled with the Republicans’ support for the Thirteenth Amendment ending slavery, made Douglass a staunch Republican for the remainder of his life. As John Stauffer, historian, observes, after the war Douglass for the first time in his life was an “insider” who enjoyed exercising influence on national policymaking as the leading spokesperson for his emancipated race.54 From that vantage point, Douglass shrewdly critiqued the inner workings of the federal government as well as the character of both political parties and their leaders. Early in Reconstruction, Douglass aligned with the Radical Republicans and loudly opposed the conciliatory policies of Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, toward the defeated Confederates.55 As Johnson permitted Southerners to attempt to return the emancipated African Americans to a slavelike status, Douglass’s speeches articulated a trenchant analysis of problems in the federal system and constitutional balance of powers. Douglass proposed a sweeping series of constitutional reforms, not just to ensure equal rights but to enhance the very democratic character of the American government.56 For example, Douglass condemned the presidential veto, brandished frequently by Johnson to attempt to block legislation to protect the freedmen, as “alien to every idea of republican government—borrowed from the old world, from king craft and priest craft, and all other adverse craft to republican government. It is anti-republican, anti-democratic, anti-common sense.”57

In 1870, Douglass relocated from Rochester to Washington, D.C., where he assisted two of his sons in editing a weekly political newspaper, the New National Era. Once again, his editorial pen expounded the demand for equal treatment of all races by the national government. He briefly headed the Freedman’s Savings Bank, but found that institution to be so financially unstable that his efforts could not prevent its closure or the consequent loss of the meager savings of thousands of former slaves.58

As a powerful orator with a large following among both African Americans and white abolitionists, Douglass was recruited by the Republicans to stump in both presidential and state election campaigns. A loyal party worker and an acknowledged leading black Republican, Douglass received a number of political appointments in the postbellum years, including the offices of assistant secretary to the U.S. Santo Domingo Commission (1871), the U.S. marshal (1877–1881) and recorder of deeds for the District of Columbia (1881–1886), and minister resident to the Republic of Haiti (1889–1891). Booker T. Washington noted that Douglass regarded these government appointments “to mean some fresh recognition of the worth of the Negro race.”59

Residence of Frederick Douglass, Washington, D.C. From the collection of the Rochester Public Library Local History Division.

Another major reason for Douglass’s strong partisan loyalties was the condition of his fellow blacks in the former slave states. As Reconstruction progressed, resistance grew to Republican attempts to assist freed slaves to attain full citizenship and economic opportunities. Many Southern whites resisted such efforts politically with membership in the Democratic Party and violently through groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. As Democrats gradually regained control of Southern state governments, Douglass advised blacks to remain loyal to the party of Lincoln because “the Republican party is the deck, all outside is the sea.”60

Inside the Republican Party, Douglass aligned with the Stalwart faction, believing that white politicians such as Ulysses S. Grant, John A. Logan, and Roscoe Conkling had a stronger record of support for civil rights than competing Republican leaders. Douglass particularly was displeased with the relative indifference that Rutherford B. Hayes, James A. Garfield, and James G. Blaine displayed toward black rights. Nonetheless, Douglass fought against any suggestion that African Americans split their votes between the two major parties to gain more leverage with each. In speeches directed toward white audiences, Douglass strongly counseled against concessions to the growing mood of sectional reconciliation. He reminded Northerners that “there was a right side and a wrong side in the late war, which no sentiment ought to cause us to forget.”61

Douglass campaigned vigorously on behalf of his race for passage and ratification of two more constitutional amendments, the Fourteenth to recognize black citizenship and the Fifteenth to confer the vote on black males. The latter proposal produced a serious quarrel between black leaders and many proponents of woman suffrage. Women’s rights supporters favored an amendment to enfranchise all adults, male and female, black and white. Douglass had steadfastly supported the women’s rights campaign since his attendance at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, but felt that combining that cause with black male suffrage would probably defeat both at that time. After the successful ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, he went back to work for woman suffrage and campaigned for that cause up to his death. Over nearly a half century, he left a large body of eloquent pleas for full citizenship for female Americans. For example, Douglass told an 1888 audience that “the government that excludes women from all participation in its creation, administration and perpetuation, maims itself, deprives itself of one-half of all that is wisest and best for its usefulness, success and perfection.”62

Douglass viewed his support for women’s rights partially as repayment for the dedicated effort of many female abolitionists on behalf of the emancipation of his race but also as the fulfillment of a more comprehensive vision of reform; as he declared, “All good causes are mutually helpful. The benefits accruing from this movement for the equal rights of woman are not confined or limited to woman only. They will be shared by every effort to promote the progress and welfare of mankind everywhere and in all ages.”63 Douglass sought to welcome women as the equals of men into the political sphere; however, his view of gender roles inside the household remained a traditional one.

During the post–Civil War decades, Douglass became a sought-after lyceum lecturer. He toured the country to speak on such diverse topics as ethnology, photography, self-made men, and the Protestant Reformation. These addresses provide numerous examples of the wisdom that Douglass had acquired through a lifetime of rigorous self-education. They also provide valuable insight into Douglass’s thinking on a considerable range of the intellectual and cultural issues of the last third of the nineteenth century. Douglass confided in the leading U.S. lyceum operator, James Redpath, that his lectures drew large audiences largely because of his fame as a former slave and abolitionist. The lyceum-going public, he reported, “do not attend lectures to hear statesmanlike addresses, which are usually rather heavy for the stomachs of young and old who listen. People want to be amused as well as instructed. They come as often for the former as the latter, and perhaps as often to see the man as for either.”64

After the Civil War, Douglass frequently used the podium to advise black audiences about the virtues of education, enterprise, and thrift. He exhorted a Virginia audience, “if man is without education although with all his latent possibility attaching to him he is, as I have said, but a pitiable object; a giant in body but a pigmy in intellect, and at best but half a man. Without education he lives within the narrow, dark and grimy walls of ignorance. He is a poor prisoner without hope.”65 As he had argued throughout his public career, African American economic achievement would be a sure answer to white racial prejudice.66

In 1879, Douglass became enmeshed in a serious controversy among black leaders when he advised Southern blacks not to migrate to the prairie states but to remain in the South and struggle there for full equality. Black opponents charged that Douglass was losing touch with the grim realities facing most members of his race. In a carefully prepared paper for a meeting of the American Social Science Association, Douglass responded,

The habit of roaming from place to place in pursuit of better conditions of existence is by no means a good one. A man should never leave his home for a new one till he has earnestly endeavored to make his immediate surroundings accord with his wishes…. No people ever did much for themselves or for the world, without the sense and inspiration of native land; of a fixed home; of a familiar neighborhood, and common associations.67

Rather than being callous to the suffering of the Southern freedmen, Douglass’s position demonstrated a commitment to racial self- improvement and an unabated optimism that American race relations could be improved. From the antebellum colonization movement to the African emigration plans advanced in the 1850s to the Exoduster movement after Reconstruction, Douglass consistently opposed such “Utopian and impossible enterprises” as a diversion from the struggle for racial justice at home.68

Douglass also was the center of a second, more personal controversy when, following the death of his wife Anna in 1881, he married a younger white woman, Helen Pitts, who had been his secretary at the Recorder of Deeds Office. Scholars have observed considerable strain in Douglass’s first marriage on account of Anna Murray’s discomfort in socializing with her husband’s predominately white, well-educated, and female admirers. These domestic strains also seemed to have troubled Douglass’s relationship with most of his adult children, who also struggled to match their father’s success in a still heavily racist society. His children had difficulty accepting Helen into the family, but in time their relationship became cordial if not intimate. This family situation was not helped when some other black leaders publicly criticized Douglass for marrying outside his race.69

Anna Murray Douglass. Courtesy National Park Service, Museum Management Program and Frederick Douglass National Historic Site. FRDO246. Photo by Carol M. Highsmith.

Frederick Douglass, his second wife Helen Pitts Douglass (right), and her sister Eva Pitts (center). Courtesy National Park Service, Museum Management Program and Frederick Douglass National Historic Site. FRDO3912. Photo by Carol M. Highsmith.

Ever the proper Victorian, Douglass rarely commented publicly on such private matters. His lectures and speeches, however, reveal a Douglass who thought deeply on questions of racial identity. He frequently commented on the mistreatment of recent immigrants, particularly the Chinese, and on the dire prospects of Native Americans on the dwindling frontier. Despite his personal experience of prejudice, Douglass remained confident that the nation ultimately would resolve its racial tensions, predicting that “Races and varieties of the human family appear and disappear, but humanity remains and will remain forever.”70

In 1881, Douglass returned for the third time to writing an autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. Rather than picking up where the 1855 concluded, Douglass prepared a new account of his life from his slave childhood to his current position as the nation’s best-known and most influential African American. Douglass hoped that his life story would help reassure other African Americans that literacy, temperance, thrift, and hard work could surmount any obstacles posed by white racial prejudices. Modern scholars have recognized and frequently criticized the consciously Franklin-esque portrayal by Douglass of his rise from lowly origins. Likewise, Life and Times also has been dismissed for its sometimes clumsy prose style and its author’s defensive account of his public career.71 David Blight, however, applauds Douglass’s last autobiography as well as his later speeches for resisting the popular tide toward sectional reconciliation in the 1880s and 1890s that required disavowing the painful history of slavery.72

Diplomat

Perhaps to escape the controversy surrounding their marriage, Douglass and Helen departed on a lengthy honeymoon tour of Europe and the Middle East in September 1886. During these travels, Douglass had enjoyable reunions with many aging colleagues from the abolitionist days, including Julia Griffiths, his former editorial assistant, who had returned to live in her native England. The Douglasses eventually moved on to visit many important historical landmarks in France, Italy, and Greece. The high point of this tour for Douglass was a stop in Egypt. Douglass got to view Africa firsthand and climbed to the top of the Pyramid of Cheops. This last stop enhanced Douglass’s appreciation of the African contributions to classical civilization. Douglass also had the opportunity to leave numerous discerning observations about both the modern European and the classical worlds. Foreign travel also reinforced Douglass’s core belief in unity of mankind. He told a Washington audience on his return to the United States, “In the East as in the West; in Egypt as in America; in all the world human nature is the same. Conditions may vary but the nature of man is permanent.”73

Soon after his return to Washington, Douglass campaigned vigorously for the election of Benjamin Harrison, Indiana Republican, to the presidency. After Harrison won that office, he appointed Douglass to serve as the U.S. ambassador to the Caribbean island republic of Haiti. Some black leaders felt that Douglass had been slighted by the offer of this minor diplomatic post, but he regarded undertaking the appointment as a serious responsibility. According to McFeely, Douglass regarded Haiti as the symbol of “the liberation and autonomy of black people” and did not want it “exposed to the contempt of an insensitive white minister.”74

The history of Haiti throughout the nineteenth century was one of political instability. It was Douglass’s job to represent the United States before the government of Florvil Hyppolite, who had come to power after a bloody civil war. The United States had given crucial assistance to Hyppolite in that conflict and now expected him to comply with their request for the long-term lease of a naval coaling station at Môle-Saint-Nicholas in the northwest corner of the country. Douglass loyally presented the American request for control of the Môle to the Haitian government. Fearing this to be only the first of many such requests for concessions, Hyppolite stalled in responding. Impatient, the Harrison administration dispatched the Atlantic fleet to Haitian waters, and its admiral assumed direction of the Môle negotiations from Douglass. When Hyppolite continued to resist, Harrison allowed the crisis to be defused by withdrawing the fleet. Douglass took this opportunity to resign his diplomatic post and later voiced his disapproval of all attempts to coerce the Haitians to cede territory against their will. Faced with inalterable Haitian opposition, the Harrison administration eventually gave up its pressure for a naval base lease.75

Frederick Douglass with Madam Hyppolite in Haiti. Courtesy National Park Service, Museum Management Program and Frederick Douglass National Historic Site. FRDO157. Photo by Carol M. Highsmith.

Lessons of the Hour

Douglass had been back at his Washington home from his diplomatic mission for only a year when he received a request from Hyppolite to serve the Haitian government. In 1892, a mammoth international fair, known as the World’s Columbian Exposition was to be convened in Chicago to commemorate the four-hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to the New World. The Haitians funded a modest pavilion to display their agricultural and handicraft products. To head that pavilion and speak on behalf of Haiti at the numerous events planned during the year and-a-half-long exposition, President Hyppolite called on Douglass. This appointment demonstrates that the Haitians did not hold Douglass to blame for the bullying their country endured over the Môle-Saint-Nicholas at the hands of the Harrison administration.

Douglass accepted the post and along with Helen settled temporarily in Chicago. As anticipated, he made several major orations proclaiming the accomplishments of the Haitians and inferentially of all peoples of African descent. Douglass held up Haiti as an answer to charges of black inferiority, declaring, “The mission of Haiti was to dispel this degradation and dangerous delusion, and to give to the world a new and true revelation of the black man’s character. This mission, she has performed and performed it well.”76

During the exposition, Douglass also joined other blacks in protesting the lack of displays of any African American mechanical and intellectual achievements. Douglass furthermore used his time in Chicago to meet numerous younger blacks, such as Lawrence Dunbar, the poet, whom he encouraged to dedicate themselves to the cause of racial uplift.

One important acquaintance that Douglass made in Chicago was Ida B. Wells. A young journalist, Wells was struggling to expose the racist motivations of a recent wave of lynchings of Southern black males. Inspired by Wells’s fervor, Douglass took up the antilynching cause. In his last years, he traveled widely to deliver his powerful “Lessons of the Hour” address, which vehemently denounced lynching. Even more significantly, Douglass rebuked prominent whites, such as Daniel H. Chamberlain, former South Carolina governor, and Frances Willard, temperance leader, for publicly condoning such outrages. He called on the North, and especially the Republican Party, to remember its commitment to the freedmen and to punish this antiblack barbarity. In his final advice to Americans, he declared, “Put away your racial prejudice. Banish the idea that one class must rule over another, recognize the fact that the rights of the humblest citizen are as worthy of protection as are those of the highest, and…your Republic will stand and flourish forever.”77 In what proved his last major address, Douglass demonstrated that he still possessed the same fire as he had in his youth to championing the right of his race to equal treatment in this nation without fear of censure or controversy.

Ida B. Wells. From “Women of Distinction: Remarkable in Works and Invincible in Character” (published 1893). Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division. Schomburg Center/Art Resource, N.Y.

The Legacy of Frederick Douglass

Politically active even in the face of his advancing years, Douglass attended a women’s rights rally in Washington at the invitation of Susan B. Anthony on February 20, 1895. When he went home that evening, he prepared to attend another meeting at a neighborhood black church. Then, Douglass suddenly collapsed and quickly died of a heart attack. His passing was mourned nationwide. Five state legislatures adopted resolutions of official regret. Senators and a U.S. Supreme Court justice attended a memorial service for Douglass in Washington. He was buried in Rochester, and a heroic statue was erected near the site of his old house there.

As already noted, Douglass became a venerated symbol frequently called on during the civil rights struggles of the twentieth century. He also attracted critics. Just as the goals and tactics of the civil rights movement underwent vigorous debate during the 1960s, Douglass’s legacy was sometimes attacked as too wedded to “interracialism, integrationism, and Americanism.”78 Although more than a century old, Douglass’s own words make the strongest reply to modern-day detractors. His unwavering dedication to the rights guaranteed by the Constitution and to a broad definition of inherent human rights makes Douglass’s message relevant to the struggles for liberty and equality still being waged today.

The Douglass funeral: Inside. From the collection of the Rochester Public Library Local History Division.

Notes

1. Quoted in Herbert Aptheker, “DuBois on Douglass, 1895,” Journal of Negro History 49(October 1964): 265, 267.

2. Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass (Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs, 1906), 338.

3. Moses J. Wilson, “Where Honor Is Due: Frederick Douglass as Representative Black Man,” Prospects 17(1992): 177–88; Waldo E. Martin Jr., “Images of Frederick Douglass in the Afro-American Mind: The Recent Black Freedom Struggle,” in Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays, ed. Eric J. Sundquist, 277–79 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Peter C. Myers, Frederick Douglass: Race and the Rebirth of American Liberalism (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2008), 1–7, 195–203.

4. As quoted in Martin, “Images of Frederick Douglass,” 280.

5. Roy P. Basler, The Lincoln Legend: A Study of Changing Conceptions [1935] (New York: Octagon, 1969); Merrill Peterson, The Jeffersonian Image in the American Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960); Marcus Cunliffe, George Washington: Man and Monument (Boston: Little, Brown, 1958); Thomas L. Connelly, The Marble Man: Robert E. Lee and His Image in American Society (New York: Knopf, 1977); Merrill D. Peterson, John Brown: The Legend Revisited (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002); Stacey Schiff, “Desperate Seeking Susan,” New York Times, October 16, 2006.

6. Nathan Irvin Huggins, Slave and Citizen: The Life of Frederick Douglass (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), 4.

7. Dickson J. Preston, Young Frederick Douglass: The Maryland Years (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 87.

8. John W. Blassingame and John R. McKivigan, eds., The Frederick Douglass Papers, ser. 2 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999–2011) [hereafter, Douglass Papers, ser. 2], 2:84.

9. William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 34.

10. My Bondage and My Freedom, in Douglass Papers, ser. 2, 2:141.

11. Waldo E. Martin Jr., The Mind of Frederick Douglass (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 13.

12. Peter C. Myers, Frederick Douglass: Race and the Rebirth of American Liberalism (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2008), 20–82.

13. My Bondage and My Freedom, in Douglass Papers, ser. 2, 2:188.

14. Alan J. Rice and Martin Crawford, Liberating Sojourn: Frederick Douglass & Transatlantic Reform (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999), 1.

15. McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 78.

16. My Bondage and My Freedom, in Douglass Papers, ser. 2, 2:200–201.

17. Merton L. Dillon, Slavery Attacked: Southern Slaves and Their Allies, 1619–1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 5–27, 130–61; Peter P. Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 91–115.

18. James Brewer Stewart, Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976), 35–96.

19. My Bondage and My Freedom, in Douglass Papers, ser. 2, 2:204.

20. Martin, Mind of Frederick Douglass, 22.

21. Gregory Lampe, Frederick Douglass, Freedom’s Voice (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1998), 57–96.

22. Isaac Nelson quoted in the 1846 Dublin edition of the Narrative. See Douglass Papers, ser. 2, 1:xxxix.

23. Harold Bloom, ed., Modern Critical Interpretations: Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (New York: Chelsea House, 1988); William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 214–39; Deborah McDowell, “In the First Place: Frederick Douglass and the Afro-American Tradition,” in Critical Essays on Frederick Douglass, ed. William L. Andrews (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991), 192–214; Henry Louis Gates, “From Wheatley to Douglass: The Politics of Displacement,” in Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 47–65.

24. Speech: “Principles of Temperance Reform,” March 5, 1848, in The Frederick Douglass Papers, ser. 1, ed. John W. Blassingame and John R. McKivigan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979–1992) [hereafter, Douglass Papers, ser. 1], 2:107.

25. Speech: “Slavery Corrupts American Society and Religion,” October 17, 1845, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 1:51.

26. David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War: Keeping the Faith in Jubilee (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991), 118–21.

27. John R. McKivigan and Jason H. Silverman, “Monarchial Liberty and Republican Slavery: West Indies Emancipation Celebrations in Upstate New York and Canada West,” Afro-Americans in New York Life and History 19 (January 1986): 7–18.

28. Rice and Crawford, Liberating Sojourn, 3.

29. Martin, Mind of Frederick Douglass, 31–32.

30. Life and Times, in Douglass Papers, ser. 2, 3:206–207.

31. Quoted in Stewart, Holy Warriors, 149.

32. This relationship is skillfully examined in John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 61–64, 278–79. Also see John R. McKivigan, “The Frederick Douglass-Gerrit Smith Friendship and Political Abolitionism in the 1850s,” in Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 205–32.

33. Speech: “The Anti-Slavery Movement,” March 19, 1855, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 3:19–20.

34. Ibid., 3:45.

35. Robert B. Stepto, “Storytelling in Early Afro-American Fiction: ‘Frederick Douglass’ ‘The Heroic Slave.’” Georgia Review 36 (summer 1982): 355–68.

36. McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 181.

37. Eric J. Sundquist, ed., Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 11.

38. Phyllis F. Field, The Politics of Race in New York: The Struggle for Black Suffrage in the Civil War Era (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 35–37.

39. Robert S. Levine, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 58–98.

40. Robert Stepto, “Sharing the Thunder: The Literary Exchanges of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Bibb, and Frederick Douglass,” in New Essays on Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 136–37, 143–52; Levine, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, 83–85.

41. Levine, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, 82–83.

42. My Bondage and My Freedom, in Douglass Papers, ser. 2, 2:185. See also Rosetta Douglass, My Mother as I Recall Her: A Paper Read before Anna Murray Douglass Union, W.C.T.U., May 10, 1900 (Washington, D.C.: National Association of Colored Women, 1923), 14; McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 172.

43. Speech: “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” July 5, 1852, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 2:376.

44. David S. Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights (New York: Vintage Books, 2005), 95–137; Stephen B. Oates To Purge This Land with Blood: A Biography of John Brown (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970), 97–18; McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 192.

45. Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War, 95–96. See also Leslie Friedman Goldstein, “Violence as an Instrument for Social Change: The Views of Frederick Douglass (1817–1895),” Journal of Negro History 61(January 1976): 61–66.

46. Editorial: “John Brown Not Insane,” Douglass’ Monthly, November 1859; Myers, Frederick Douglass, 225–26n.

47. Speech: “John Brown and the Slaveholders’ Insurrection,” January 30, 1860, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 3:317.

48. Speech: “Did John Brown Fail?” May 30, 1881, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 5:21.

49. Leslie Friedman Goldstein, “Morality & Prudence in the Statesmanship of Frederick Douglass: Radical as Reformer,” Polity 16, no. 4 (summer 1984), 620; Martin, Mind of Frederick Douglass, 35; Myers, Frederick Douglass, 96, 101; Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War, 57–58; McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 208; Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men, 278.

50. Speech: “The Mission of the War,” January 13, 1864, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 4:6.

51. Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War, 235.

52. Speech: “Negroes and the National War Effort,” July 6, 1863, in The Frederick Douglass Papers, ser. 3, ed. John R. McKivigan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009) [hereafter Douglass Papers, ser. 3], 3:596.

53. Life and Times, in Douglass Papers, ser. 2, 3:281.

54. Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men, 279.

55. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 176–227.

56. Myers, Frederick Douglass, 130–32.

57. Speech: “Sources of Danger to the Republic,” February 7, 1867, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 4:164.

58. Carl R. Osthaus, Freedmen, Philanthropy, and Fraud: A History of the Freedman’s Savings Bank (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), 183.

59. Washington, Frederick Douglass, 292.

60. Speech: “The Republican Party Must Be Maintained in Power,” April 13, 1872, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 4:298. See also Foner, Reconstruction, 412–59.

61. Speech: “There Was a Right Side in the Late War,” May 30, 1878, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 4:491. See also Donald Barr Chidsey, The Gentleman from New York: A Life of Roscoe Conkling (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1935), 209–93.

62. Speech: “I Am a Radical Woman Suffrage Man,” May 28, 1888, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 5:387.

63. Speech: “Give Women Fair Play,” March 31, 1888, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 5:355.

64. As quoted in John R. McKivigan, Forgotten Firebrand: James Redpath and the Making of Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), 122.

65. Speech: “The Blessings of Liberty and Education,” September 3, 1894, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 5:623.

66. Martin, Mind of Frederick Douglass, 26–27.

67. Speech: “The Negro Exodus from the Gulf States,” September 12, 1879, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 4:527.

68. As quoted in Myers, Frederick Douglass, 159. For an unsympathetic appraisal of Douglass’s view of the Exoduster movement, see Nell I. Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976), 249.

69. McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 310–11, 320.

70. Speech: “Our Composite Nationality,” December 7, 1869, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 4:245. See also Martin, Mind of Frederick Douglass, 197–251.

71. McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 311–12; Sundquist, Frederick Douglass, 4.

72. David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2001), 311–19. See also William L. Andrews, “Reunion in the Postbellum Slave Narrative: Frederick Douglass and Elizabeth Keckley,” Black American Literature Forum, 23(spring 1989): 7.

73. Speech: “My Foreign Travels,” December 15, 1887, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 5:328.

74. McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 336.

75. Life and Times, in Douglass Papers, ser. 2, 3:439–57; McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 334–58.

76. Speech: “Haiti and the Haitian People,” January 2, 1893, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 5:529.

77. Speech: “Lessons of the Hour,” January 9, 1894, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 5:607.

78. Martin, “Images of Frederick Douglass,” 280–82. See also Vincent Harding, There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1981), 167; Wilson, “Where Honor Is Due,” 177–88.