Frederick Douglass: A Life in Documents

By Frederick Douglass and L. Diane Barnes

Frederick Douglass was born enslaved in February 1818, but from this most humble of beginnings, he rose to become a world-famous orator, newspaper editor, and champion of the rights of women and African Americans. He not only survived slavery to live in freedom but also became an outspoken critic of the institution and an active participant in the U.S. political system. Douglass advised presidents of the United States and formally represented his country in the diplomatic corps. He was the most prominent African American activist of the nineteenth century, and he left a treasure trove of documentary evidence detailing his life in slavery and achievements in freedom. This volume gathers and interprets valuable selections from a variety of Douglass’s writings, including speeches, editorials, correspondence, and autobiographies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Aug 6, 2013
• ISBN: 9780813934372

Frederick Douglass

Fredrick Douglass (1817-1895) was an American leader of the abolitionist movement who was born into a life of slavery. In 1838 he escaped his enslavement and settled in a free black community in Massachusetts, where he established a newspaper; Douglass subsequently became a prominent abolitionist speaker. After the publication of Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass (1845) Douglas traveled to Europe, where he attracted large crowds. British supporters bought his legal freedom, and in 1847 he returned to the United States as a free man. Douglas went on to establish many abolitionist newspapers and wrote two more autobiographical works.

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Introduction

As the most prominent African American of the nineteenth century, Frederick Douglass left behind a treasure trove of documents. Ranging from autobiographies, public addresses, and newspaper editorials to unpublished personal letters, his writings reveal the world of this most uncommon of American reformers and civil rights activists. The range of his experiences also offers a window into the history of African Americans across much of the nineteenth century. Following his escape from slavery as a young man, Douglass joined the ranks of northerners fighting for the immediate abolition of slavery. When the Civil War erupted, he recruited black troops for the Union and advised President Abraham Lincoln on issues important to African Americans. During Reconstruction and after, Douglass served in minor political appointments in Washington, DC, and temporarily headed a bank. In 1889 he was appointed minister to Haiti, and very late in his life he represented that nation at the World’s Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago in 1893. This volume gathers a selection of Douglass’s writings and speeches that will be new to many readers, offering a unique window into the life of America’s most famous former slave, but also explores the broader world of nineteenth-century reform and social activism.

Part 1 explores Douglass’s youth as a slave in Maryland, and by extension some of the important themes in the history of slavery. Douglass recounted his life in slavery in three autobiographies and in lectures on the antislavery circuit. In the decades before the Civil War, slave narratives were a powerful propaganda tool of the abolitionist movement, which employed them to convince the northern reading public of the evils of slavery. Because most northerners never encountered slavery as it existed in the southern states, the dramatic depictions penned by former slaves had a powerful impact. Between the onset of the movement for immediate abolition in 1830 and the publication of Douglass’s first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, in 1845, at least two dozen black autobiographies and slave narratives appeared in print.¹ Douglass’s audience was northern whites, especially those individuals who had to be convinced of the need to bring an immediate end to slavery. His first book followed the conventions of slave autobiography, but in a second volume, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), he expanded the details of his youth and revised several stories appearing in the Narrative. He also added an extensive account of his early involvement in the abolition movement. Ostensibly to protect those who had aided him, Douglass saved the full account of his escape from slavery for a third autobiographical volume, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. First published in 1881, this much longer book was substantially revised for a second publishing in 1892, just three years before his death. In it, Douglass found a vehicle for responding to the numerous critics who disapproved of many of his postwar choices and his continued allegiance to the Republican Party.

Douglass’s twenty years in slavery were unusual. Unlike most enslaved men and women, who spent their entire life working on a plantation or farm, Douglass lived most of his youth in the shipbuilding center of Baltimore, while also spending several years on plantations and farms on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Douglass was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey in February 1818 at the Holme Hill Farm of his mother’s master in Talbot County, Maryland, the pretentious name suggesting that he was destined for something more important than the life of a field slave. He was the second of six or seven children born to Harriet Bailey, an enslaved field hand belonging to Aaron Anthony. Anthony, often believed to be Frederick’s father, was the chief overseer and general manager for the Eastern Shore’s wealthiest landowner, Edward Lloyd V. Owning more slaves than were needed to work his own property, Anthony leased Harriet to area farmers as a field laborer. As was common for enslaved children too young to work, Frederick spent his early years in the care of his grandmother Betsey Bailey. Also the property of Anthony, but married to a free black man named Isaac Bailey, Betsey cared for the youngest of the Anthony slaves and also acted as a midwife. Although he spent several years in the care of his grandmother, Frederick recalled seeing his mother on only those few occasions when she had the energy after work to walk many miles between farms. Following an extended illness, Harriet Bailey died in late 1825 or early 1826, when Frederick was about seven years old.² Within months, in the spring of 1826, Anthony sent Frederick to Baltimore to work in the household of Hugh Auld, the brother-in-law of Anthony’s only daughter, Lucretia.

The young slave’s life was further altered in 1826, when Aaron Anthony died. Anthony’s substantial estate included thirty slaves and three farms, all to be divided among his heirs. Anthony’s daughter, Lucretia Planner Anthony Auld, received ten of her father’s slaves, but according to Maryland law, it was her husband, Thomas Auld, who became Frederick’s new master. A local storekeeper and sloop captain, Auld had little use for an eight-year-old slave boy, so he sent Frederick back to Baltimore to live with his brother. Hugh Auld, a ship’s carpenter in the Fell’s Point neighborhood of the city, and his wife, Sophia, welcomed young Frederick as a companion for their son, Tommy. Neither was an experienced slaveholder, and in their home, at least initially, Frederick was treated more like a child than like a slave. He was able to explore Fell’s Point on his own, and until her husband stopped it, Sophia Auld began teaching the eager boy to read. The lessons ended when Hugh Auld learned of them and chastised his wife, but Frederick found other means of gaining literacy and could soon read and write.³

While in Baltimore, Frederick gained possession of a copy of The Columbian Orator, a collection of speeches by famous world leaders. The book would have immeasurable significance for his life and his career as a reformer and public speaker. Frederick read The Columbian Orator aloud and studied the structure and sentence patterns of each oration. By his mid-teens he was quite the city slave, accustomed to visiting the shipyards, attending church services, and enjoying time away from the watchful eyes of his masters to read and study. He began to harbor a fierce desire to escape to freedom in the North. Frederick remembered little of rural life on the Eastern Shore and had had no contact with his grandmother or his siblings since being sent to live with the Aulds. That changed in March 1833, when a bitter dispute between Hugh and Thomas Auld resulted in Frederick’s return to Talbot County.

Arriving in St. Michaels after seven years in Baltimore, Frederick was a petulant fifteen-year-old. Torn away from the urban world where he enjoyed at least some measure of personal freedom, he experienced a rude awakening to what it meant to be a rural slave. He did reconnect with family, and his sister Eliza was particularly helpful in teaching him survival strategies for his new situation. By the end of the year, however, Frederick’s displeasure with his situation still showed. He became involved in establishing a Sabbath school to teach local slaves to read and study the Bible. When Thomas Auld learned of the school, he immediately curtailed his slave’s involvement. Determined to break his spirit and make him a useful slave, Auld hired Frederick to a local farmer, Edward Covey, who was a notorious slave breaker.⁴

For the first time in his life, in January 1834 Frederick found himself working in the fields as his mother and siblings had done. Covey drove him hard, trying his best to break his spirit with hard labor and beatings, but instead of becoming a more dutiful slave, Frederick chose to fight back. His fear of Covey’s cruelty came to an abrupt end in late summer. After enduring numerous beatings at the hands of this brutal man, the scars of which he would proudly display in later years, Frederick determined that he would take no more abuse. When Covey next made a physical attack, Frederick hit back and after a prolonged wrestling match emerged victorious. Describing the scene over and over in future oration and writings, he considered the fight with the notorious slave breaker a major turning point in his life and a marker in his struggle to gain his freedom.

Perhaps fearing a loss of reputation, Covey never took revenge for the beating, and the remainder of the year passed uneventfully. Frederick’s spirited nature remained intact, and his desire for freedom grew exponentially. In the spring of 1836, while hired to another local farmer, Frederick and several others plotted their escape. Unfortunately, another slave exposed their plan, and Frederick and several co-conspirators were jailed in Easton, Maryland. Although many slaves who attempted escape were sold into the Deep South to diminish their influence in the local slave community, Frederick once again found his life taking an exceptional turn. Determining that this unusual teenaged slave was more bother than he was worth, Thomas Auld sent Frederick back to Baltimore to live with his brother.

Acclimating quickly again to city life, Frederick was employed in the shipyards of Baltimore, where he learned the semiskilled trade of a ship’s caulker. Eventually, even though the practice was illegal, Hugh Auld allowed him to hire his own time and make his own living arrangements, so long as he delivered his weekly wages. Living a life of quasi freedom, he began to strongly resent his enslavement and determined to gain his freedom. Between 1836 and 1838 Frederick also established a foothold in Baltimore’s African American community. The city had a large free black community, and his relative freedom of movement allowed him to make friends from a wide segment of black Baltimore. He joined a debating club, the East Baltimore Mental Improvement Society, in which he may have been the only enslaved member. At a social gathering of the group, Frederick met Anna Murray, a free black woman who worked as a domestic servant. Although she was illiterate and did not share his quest for knowledge, Anna was an Eastern Shore native with whom he had much in common.⁵

Using his connections in the Baltimore free community, Frederick planned his final and successful escape in the late summer of 1838. Aided by Anna Murray, who helped pay for his passage, and borrowing the identification papers of a sailor friend, on September 3 twenty-year-old Frederick boarded a train bound for the North. After a harrowing few days of travel, he arrived safely in New York City. Anna met him there, and the two were married on September 15, 1838. They settled in the shipbuilding city of New Bedford, Massachusetts, and in order to avoid recapture, Frederick took the name Frederick Douglass, after a character in Sir Walter Scott’s Lady of the Lake.

After struggling and failing to find a caulker’s position because of his race, Douglass worked at a number of manual-labor jobs in New Bedford. He quickly learned that although African Americans enjoyed freedom from slavery, racial equality was not a part of northern society. New Bedford did, however, harbor a large fugitive slave enclave and a generally inclusive African American community. Through his involvement with local blacks, Douglass learned about the movement for the immediate abolition of slavery. Although he could hardly afford it, he subscribed to the Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison’s weekly abolitionist newspaper. He also began attending local antislavery meetings, where he met both whites and blacks committed to overthrowing southern slavery. In August 1841 he was invited to recount his experiences in slavery at a Massachusetts antislavery convention held in Nantucket. After his speech, John A. Collins, a general agent for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, offered Douglass a temporary position as a paid lecturer. For the next three months he traveled with Collins and other abolitionists, speaking at antislavery meetings around the commonwealth. At the end of the lecture tour, already gaining a reputation as a powerful public speaker, Douglass was hired as a permanent field agent.

The documents in part 2 explore Douglass’s entrance into the world of antebellum reform and his maturation as a leader for his race. Emerging on the public stage as an abolitionist lecturer, he published many of his writings as letters in antislavery newspapers, but many handwritten examples were saved by his correspondents. Douglass’s earliest known letter, written to his new mentor, William Lloyd Garrison, dates from November 1842. His speeches were captured orally and recounted in the press as well. Later, in 1847, Douglass began publishing his own reform newspaper, the North Star, which gave him his own editorial platform. Part 2 draws from a variety of published and private sources to explore the circles of northern reformers.

With his abolitionist companions, Douglass traveled widely across New England, western New York, and even the Midwest in the early 1840s. He recounted his experiences in slavery before numerous crowds, many of whom had never encountered a former slave. He also met other black reformers and joined with them in attending conventions to discuss issues of particular interest to African Americans in the North, namely, gaining voting rights and full equality. Douglass’s speeches were delivered with such polish and eloquence that some began to doubt that he had ever been a slave. In part to counter this criticism, he penned his Narrative, which was published in Boston in 1845 and sold forty-five hundred copies within four months.

As abolitionist propaganda, most slave narratives protected the true identity of the author by changing names and localities. Douglass, however, told the full truth because his credibility was in question. He named his master and many others whom he had known on the Eastern Shore and in Baltimore. To minimize his risk of recapture—he was, after all, still a fugitive slave—in August 1845 he departed the United States for an extended speaking tour of Great Britain and Ireland.

Accompanied by his fellow lecturer James Buffum, Douglass left Anna at home with their four young children, Rosetta, Lewis, Frederick Jr., and Charles. Traveling first to Ireland, where he began a three-month speaking tour, Douglass was introduced to the world of transatlantic reform, which was unlike anything he had experienced in the United States. In addition to the abolition of slavery in America, British and Irish reformers were involved in a host of causes, including temperance. Since Douglass opposed the use of strong liquor, he found much in common with his hosts. Slavery having been abolished in the British territories more than a decade earlier, he also found himself welcomed into social situations with little or no evidence of the racial prejudice he had witnessed even among some northern abolitionists.

In Dublin, Douglass arranged for the quick publication of an Irish edition of his Narrative, the sale of which boosted his popularity and helped fill his lecture schedule. He traveled next to Scotland, where, moving beyond his personal narrative of slavery, he gave a series of lectures condemning the Free Church of Scotland for accepting contributions from slaveholding Presbyterians in the United States. Joined by Garrison in early August 1846, Douglass helped British abolitionists organize the Anti-Slavery League, which brought together like-minded reformers in support of ending American slavery.

While touring and lecturing in England, Scotland, and Ireland, Douglass developed a desire to break free of the influence of Garrison and other white abolitionists. For their purposes, Douglass represented the ultimate justification for the abolition of slavery. They wanted him to continue to deliver his powerful and persuasive narrative detailing the evils of slavery. Already developing other intellectual and reform interests, however, Douglass yearned for both intellectual and physical emancipation from the bonds of slavery. Seeming to understand, his new British colleagues were prepared to help with both. Several British reformers, including Anna and Ellen Richardson of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, raised the necessary funds and arranged to purchase his freedom from Auld. Another group of friends raised several thousand dollars in seed money so that Douglass could start his own reform newspaper. Thanks to their generosity, when he returned to the United States in late April 1847, he was legally a free man. Douglass was also soon to move his family to Rochester, New York, where he began publishing his weekly North Star on December 3, 1847.

From his new home in Rochester, Douglass assessed his career as an abolitionist and reformer. For the first few years in New York he still championed the brand of antislavery activism most associated with William Lloyd Garrison. Known as Garrisonians, his followers rejected organized Protestant religions as too connected to southern slavery. They also avoided political participation, including voting, because in their minds the Constitution was a proslavery document, and therefore the political system it was based on was corrupted by slavery. In upstate New York, however, Douglass came in contact with a circle of political abolitionists headed by the local philanthropist Gerrit Smith. With time he came to agree with their position that the Constitution could be an active tool in the abolition of slavery and that in fact political means might offer the most logical path toward ending slavery. To acknowledge his shift toward political abolition, in 1851 Douglass merged his North Star with another reform journal to form the weekly Frederick Douglass’ Paper, and Smith became a main source of the paper’s financial support. Douglass’s editorials announced a break with the Garrisonians and his new belief that the US Constitution provided Congress with the means to abolish slavery.

The late 1840s also saw Douglass expand his connections with other activists and his involvement in various reform movements. Starting his own newspaper in part to express the African American perspective on abolition and other issues, Douglass became active in the National Negro Convention movement. These gatherings of northern African Americans brought professional men and reformers together to consider issues of particular concern to their race, including voting rights, obtaining equal access in trade and education, and civil rights. Douglass attended his first convention in 1843 and was a recognized leader in the movement by 1848. Shortly after moving to Rochester, he also befriended the radical abolitionist John Brown. While the Garrisonians supported a nonviolent approach to reform, Brown was not so patient. He outlined a plan to travel south and physically assist slaves to escape, using force if necessary. Douglass was at first shocked by Brown’s endorsement of violence, but in succeeding years he came to believe that bloodshed was justified. His friendship with Brown grew, and as sectional tensions heated up in the 1850s, Douglass increasingly believed that what he called the John Brown way would be necessary to wrench slavery from existence.

Within the Rochester community, Douglass also associated with many female reformers, including his longtime friend and fellow Rochester resident Susan B. Anthony. He also met Gerrit Smith’s first cousin Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Douglass was among a handful of men attending the Seneca Falls Convention, organized by Stanton and Lucretia Mott in July 1848, considered the first national gathering in support of women’s rights. The Declaration of Sentiments, drafted by Stanton for the convention’s approval, included a radical call for voting rights for women. When that resolution seemed doomed to fail, Douglass spoke out in its favor, convincing the convention delegates that women deserved the right to vote. He was the only African American to sign the declaration.⁶ Although he later angered many women’s rights activists when he temporarily abandoned their cause during the fight to ratify the Fifteenth Amendment, Douglass was generally supportive of their movement, seeing a keen relationship between the repression of blacks and the repression of women in American society.

Wielding the editor’s pen through the pages of the North Star, Frederick Douglass’ Paper, and then, beginning in January 1859, in Douglass’ Monthly, Douglass commented publicly on the important events of the decade, including the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which led to civil war in Bleeding Kansas. When John Brown massacred a group of proslavery men there in cold blood, Douglass defended him, shifting away from pacifism along with many other abolitionists. Following the Supreme Court’s 1857 ruling in Dred Scot v. Sandford declaring that African Americans were not US citizens, Douglass began for the first time to wonder whether African Americans might be better off in Africa or the Caribbean. Although he had long argued with his fellow black reformers against emigration outside the United States, he acknowledged that the nation’s climate was becoming increasingly hostile for his race.

Part 3 moves from the late antebellum years, when sectional tensions were escalating, through the Civil War. A plethora of documents detail Douglass’s involvement in the era, especially his actions in the public sphere. His editorials appeared in his own and other newspapers, and many of his public lectures were printed by the press or in pamphlet form. He also reflected on the Civil War years in Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. Although his recollection of events was recorded much later, in terms of accuracy it is on a par with the memoirs of participants in the era. Late in 1859 John Brown once again shocked the nation, this time with a violent attack on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. In the summer of 1859 Douglass visited Brown and his followers near Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, and the old man revealed in detail his plan to overtake the arsenal and spark an uprising among slaves in the surrounding countryside. Although Douglass no longer objected to violence in the overthrow of slavery, he recognized the futility of Brown’s plan and declined an invitation to join the raiders.

While lecturing in Philadelphia two months later, Douglass learned that Brown’s October 16 raid had failed. Several men were dead, and his old friend had been captured and charged with treason. Douglass also discovered that officials found his letters among Brown’s possessions, implicating him in the plot. To avoid his own arrest, Douglass fled to Canada and then pushed forward a pending trip to Great Britain, sailing on November 12. He watched from abroad as Brown was found guilty and hanged on December 2.

Douglass spent the winter in the company of his British friends and lecturing. All the while sectional tensions escalated in the United States as the aftermath of Brown’s raid divided the nation. Southerners built up both their militias and their fear of impending attacks on slavery. Northerners, many of whom previously had given little thought to slavery, were awakened to the institution’s wrongness. Some even celebrated Brown’s use of violence as justified. Douglass’s trip to Great Britain put the necessary distance between him and the raid but was cut short in the early spring of 1861. when he received word that his youngest daughter, Annie, had died on March 13, just a few days shy of her eleventh birthday.

Douglass rushed home to be with his family, and it soon became clear that he would not be targeted in the congressional investigation. He resumed the editorship of his newspaper but was little concerned with the national presidential election looming in November 1860. Douglass spent much of the summer and fall among his fellow New Yorkers, campaigning for a proposed equal-suffrage law that would remove a $250 property qualification imposed on African American men. He eventually offered the Republican presidential candidate, Abraham Lincoln, a lukewarm endorsement in Douglass’ Monthly, but he was not initially impressed with the party’s platform, which opposed the further extension, but not the abolition, of slavery. In fact, in the months after Lincoln’s election, as southern states began to secede from the Union, Douglass was planning an exploratory trip to Haiti with his oldest daughter, Rosetta. Although he had argued strongly with other African American leaders against emigration, in early 1861 he was so despondent over the failure of the New York suffrage law that he seriously considered leaving the country for an extended time.

Douglass abandoned his travel plans once the Civil War erupted with the firing on Fort Sumter in April 1861. He recognized immediately the war’s potential for ending slavery, even though Lincoln would not commit to making abolition a war goal. Douglass pushed for the involvement of African Americans and spoke before large northern crowds, who were more receptive to the antislavery message than ever before. Through his editorials he criticized the president and the war effort, but when Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation after the Union victory at the Battle of Antietam in September 1862, Douglass shifted gears and began to agitate even harder for black military participation.

The Emancipation Proclamation, which went into effect on January 1, 1863, freed enslaved men and women in the areas of the South under rebellion, but by mid-1862 the enlistment of African American troops was already under way in southern areas under Union control. Douglass became an active recruiter for the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts, the first black regiment organized in the North, in early 1863. Because Massachusetts had only a small free black population, Douglass and others traveled across New York and New England enlisting young men. Among Douglass’s first recruits were his sons Charles and Lewis.

Thousands of African Americans heeded Douglass’s call to service in the Union army, but many northerners were displeased with the shift, which made the abolition