Life and Times of Frederick Douglass

“To me it has ever been a grief that I knew my mother so little, and have so few of her words treasured in my remembrance. I have since learned that she was the only one of all the colored people of Tuckahoe who could read. How she acquired this knowledge I know not, for Tuckahoe was the last place in the world where she would have been likely to find facilities for learning. I can therefore fondly and proudly ascribe to her an earnest love of knowledge. That in any slave State a field-hand should learn to read is remarkable, but the achievement of my mother, considering the place and circumstances, was very extraordinary. In view of this fact, I am happy to attribute any love of letters I may have, not to my presumed Anglo-Saxon paternity, but to the native genius of my sable, unprotected, and uncultivated mother—a woman who belonged to a race whose mental endowments are still disparaged and despised.”

Here Douglass mingles sadness and pride with a bit of defiance. His mother, like millions of others, was a victim of slavery. She probably died heartbroken at having been separated from her son. By learning to read, however, she displayed the same intelligence and curiosity Douglass showed throughout his life. When asked, therefore, whether he believes that he derived his intellectual qualities from his unknown white father, Douglass can defy the rude questioner’s expectations by answering in the negative and citing his late beloved mother.

“The whole scene, with all its attendant circumstances, was revolting and shocking to the last degree, and when the motives for the brutal castigation are known, language has no power to convey a just sense of its dreadful criminality.”

Slavery unleashed the worst in human nature, including man’s desire for sexual control of an unwilling victim. Such is the case when Captain Anthony, Frederick’s first legal owner, whips the beautiful young slave woman Esther.

“They were arranged and classified by that great law of attraction which determines the sphere and affinities of men and which ordains that men whose malign and brutal propensities preponderate over their moral and intellectual endowments shall naturally fall into the employments which promise the largest gratification to their predominating instincts or propensities.”

Slavery created employment opportunities for men who, in other societies, might be more likely to die by violence or spend their lives in prison. Such was the office of “overseer,” the man responsible for making slaves work when they had no incentive to do so.

“Here was indeed a noble acquisition. If I had ever wavered under the consideration that the Almighty, in some way, had ordained slavery and willed my enslavement for His own glory, I wavered no longer. I had now penetrated to the secret of all slavery and of all oppression, and had ascertained their true foundation to be in the pride, the power and the avarice of man.” 

In Baltimore, Frederick purchases his “noble acquisition,” a copy of The Columbian Orator, a book of famous speeches from which he learns, among other things, the doctrine of natural rights.

“The plea for this outrage was then, as it is always, the tyrant’s plea of necessity. If the slaves learned to read they would learn something more and something worse. The peace of slavery would be disturbed. Slave rule would be endangered. I do not dispute the soundness of the reasoning. If slavery were right, Sabbath-schools for teaching slaves to read were wrong, and ought to have been put down. These Christian class-leaders were, to this extent, consistent. They had settled the question that slavery was right, and by that standard they determined that Sabbath-schools were wrong. To be sure they were Protestants and held to the great Protestant right of every man to “search the Scriptures” for himself; but then, to all general rules there are exceptions. How convenient! What crimes may not be committed under such ruling! But my dear class-leading Methodist brethren did not condescend to give me a reason for breaking up the school at St. Michaels. They had determined its destruction, and that was enough.”

Local slaveholders, including Thomas Auld, interrupt Frederick’s Sunday school and forbid its participants from meeting again. For this and many other reasons, slaveholders’ frequent affectations of piety always strike Douglass as particularly hypocritical.

“It is my opinion that thousands more would have escaped from slavery but for the strong affection which bound them to their families, relatives, and friends. The daughter was hindered by the love she bore her mother and the father by the love he bore his wife and children, and so on to the end of the chapter. I had no relations in Baltimore, and I saw no probability of ever living in the neighborhood of sisters and brothers; but the thought of leaving my friends was the strongest obstacle to my running away.” 

Slavery did not acknowledge the slave as a member of a family, and yet the real human affections that bind families together often served as the most powerful check upon those who otherwise would have attempted to escape. In a system replete with cruelty, this might have been slavery’s cruelest irony.

“Though I was not a murderer fleeing from justice, I felt, perhaps, quite as miserable as such a criminal. The train was moving at a very high rate of speed for that time of railroad travel, but to my anxious mind, it was moving far too slowly. Minutes were hours, and hours were days during this part of my flight. After Maryland I was to pass through Delaware-another slave State, where slave catchers generally awaited their prey, for it was not in the interior of the State, but on its borders, that these human hounds were most vigilant and active. The borderlines between slavery and freedom were the dangerous ones, for the fugitives. The heart of no fox or deer, with hungry hounds on his trail, in full chase, could have beaten more anxiously or noisily than did mine from the time I left Baltimore till I reached Philadelphia.”

Slavery created a class of “human hounds,” slave-catchers who, acting under federal authority, were empowered to hunt down fugitives and return them to their masters. This was true when Frederick escaped in 1838. It was exponentially truer after passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, which placed the full power of the federal government at the disposal of slaveholders and their minions.

“I saw in New Bedford the nearest approach to freedom and equality that I had ever seen. I was amazed when Mr. Johnson told me that there was nothing in the laws or constitution of Massachusetts that would prevent a colored man from being governor of the State, if the people should see fit to elect him. There, too, the black man's children attended the same public schools with the white man's children, and apparently without objection from any quarter. To impress me with my security from re capture and return to slavery, Mr. Johnson assured me that no slaveholder could take a slave out of New Bedford; that there were men there who would lay down their lives to save me from such a fate.”

The inhabitants of New Bedford, Massachusetts, where the fugitive Frederick takes up residence following his escape from slavery, impress Douglass with their hatred of slavery and willingness to resist fugitive-slave laws, though Douglass chooses his words carefully, describing conditions in New Bedford as the “nearest approach” to freedom and equality. As he discovers when he tries to find work in the calking trade, New Bedford is by no means free from color prejudice.

“When traveling in company with my white friends I always urged them to leave me and go into the cabin and take their comfortable births. I saw no reason why they should be miserable because I was. Some of them took my advice very readily. I confess, however, that while I was entirely honest in urging them to go, and saw no principle that should bind them to stay and suffer with me, I always felt a little nearer to those who did not take my advice and persisted in sharing my hard ships with me.”

Douglass names fellow abolitionists Wendell Phillips, James Monroe, and William White as “always dear to me for their nice feeling at this point” (186). Refusing to dine, sleep, or travel where their friend and colleague Douglass is not also welcome constitutes an act of solidarity that Douglass appreciates. It also amounts to an act of moral courage that was necessary to end such proscriptions.

“After a time, a careful reconsideration of the subject convinced me that there was no necessity for dissolving the “union between the northern and southern States”; that to seek this dissolution was no part of my duty as an abolitionist; that to abstain from voting was to refuse to exercise a legitimate and powerful means for abolishing slavery; and that the Constitution of the United States not only contained no guarantees in favor of slavery, but, on the contrary, was in its letter and spirit an anti-slavery instrument, demanding the abolition of slavery as a condition of its own existence as the supreme law of the land.”

William Lloyd Garrison, perhaps the country’s leading abolitionist, regularly denounced the US Constitution as pro-slavery. When he begins publishing his own anti-slavery newspaper, Douglass for the first time investigates the question of the Constitution’s relationship to slavery and, contrary to Garrison, concludes that the Constitution does not endorse slavery but is in fact a pro-liberty document.

“Notwithstanding the natural tendency of the human mind to weary of an old story, and to turn away from chronic abuses for which it sees no remedy, the anti-slavery agitation for thirty long years (from 1830 to 1860) was sustained with ever-increasing intensity and power. This was not entirely due to the extraordinary zeal and ability of the anti-slavery agitators themselves, for, with all their admitted ardor and eloquence, they could have done very little without the aid rendered them unwittingly by the aggressive character of slavery itself.”

Slaveholders’ ceaseless and imperious demands hastened slavery’s demise. From the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act to the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act to the infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision, slaveholders and their allies used the full power of the federal government to advance their interests. Only when they lost control of the federal government following Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 election to the presidency did they withdraw from the Union.

“Happily for the cause of human freedom, and for the final unity of the American nation, the South was mad, and would listen to no concessions. It would neither accept the terms offered, nor offer others to be accepted. It had made up its mind that under a given contingency it would secede from the Union and thus dismember the Republic. That contingency had happened, and it should execute its threat. Mr. Ireson of Georgia, expressed the ruling sentiment of his section when he told the northern peacemakers that if the people of the South were given a blank sheet of paper upon which to write their own terms on which they would remain in the Union, they would not stay. They had come to hate everything which had the prefix “Free” free soil, free States, free territories, free schools, free speech, and freedom generally, and they would have no more such prefixes. This haughty and unreasonable and unreasoning attitude of the imperious South saved the slave and saved the nation.”

During the secession crisis of 1860–61, some pusillanimous Northerners tried to bribe their departing Southern brethren back into the Union by offering every manner of shameful concession on the subject of slavery. Southern leaders, however, too angry to recognize their own interests and too arrogant to bargain with their Northern “inferiors,” rejected all overtures.

“McClellan, in command of the army, had been trying, apparently, to put down the rebellion without hurting the rebels, certainly without hurting slavery, and the government had seemed to cooperate with him in both respects. Charles Sumner, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Gerrit Smith and the whole anti-slavery phalanx at the North, had denounced this policy, and had besought Mr. Lincoln to adopt an opposite one, but in vain. Generals in the field, and councils in the Cabinet, had persisted in advancing this policy through defeats and disasters, even to the verge of ruin. We fought the rebellion, but not its cause. The key to the situation was the four millions of slaves; yet the slave who loved us, was hated, and the slaveholder who hated us, was loved. We kissed the hand that smote us, and spurned the hand that helped us.” 

In 1861–62, the Civil War’s first two years, Union forces conducted the war as if its object were simply to put the country back together. From Douglass’s perspective, the Lincoln administration appeared slow to recognize the urgency of liberating and arming the slaves. Though Douglass later acknowledges that Lincoln himself acted with the best motives under conditions unfavorable to immediate emancipation, the abolitionists’ frustrations probably reached their zenith in those early war years.

“This was not the first time I had been in imminent peril in New York city. My first arrival there, after my escape from slavery, was full of danger. My passage through its borders after the attack of John Brown on Harper's Ferry was scarcely less safe. I had encountered Isaiah Rynders and his gang of ruffians in the old Broadway Tabernacle at our anti-slavery anniversary meeting, and I knew something of the crazy temper of such crowds; but this anti-draft, anti-negro mob, was something more and something worse—it was a part of the rebel force, without the rebel uniform, but with all its deadly hate; it was the fire of the enemy opened in the rear of the loyal army.”

President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation had a wondrous effect on anti-slavery morale, but it also triggered shameful reactions such as the New York riots of July 1863. History refers to this three-day episode as the New York Draft Riots, but in truth it was three days of terror directed against the city’s Black population.

“I know not how many times and before how many people I have quoted these solemn words of our martyred President. They struck me at the time, and have seemed to me ever since to contain more vital substance than I have ever seen compressed in a space so narrow; yet on this memorable occasion, when I clapped my hands in gladness and thanksgiving at their utterance, I saw in the faces of many about me expressions of widely different emotion.”

Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address ranks among the best-known speeches ever delivered. By any measure, it must be regarded as the strongest denunciation of slavery ever uttered by a US president, and Douglass certainly regards it as such when he hears it. When he looks around the audience, however, Douglass notes some expressions of disapproval at Lincoln’s speech, including one, rather ominously, from incoming Vice-President Andrew Johnson, who, in six weeks’ time, would become the 17th president of the United States.

“At this moment a gentleman who was passing in recognized me, and I said to him: ‘Be so kind as to say to Mr. Lincoln that Frederick Douglass is detained by officers at the door.’ It was not long before Mrs. Dorsey and I walked into the spacious East Room, amid a scene of elegance such as in this country I had never before witnessed. Like a mountain pine high above all others, Mr. Lincoln stood, in his grand simplicity, and home- like beauty. Recognizing me, even before I reached him, he exclaimed. so that all around could hear him, ‘Here comes my friend Douglass.’ Taking me by the hand, he said, ‘I am glad to see you. I saw you in the crowd to -day, listening to my inaugural address; how did you like it?’ I said, ‘Mr. Lincoln, I must not detain you with my poor opinion, when there are thousands waiting to shake hands with you.’ ‘No, no,’ he said, ‘you must stop a little, Douglass; there is no man in the country whose opinion I value more than yours. I want to know what you think of it?’ I replied, ‘Mr. Lincoln, that was a sacred effort.’ ‘I am glad you liked it!’ he said; and I passed on, feeling that any man, however distinguished, might well regard himself honored by such expressions, from such a man.”

President Lincoln’s verbal and physical embrace, moments after White House guards, acting upon customary color prejudice, try to prevent Douglass from entering the building, rates as one of the book’s—and American history’s—most powerful yet poignant moments. Acts of moral greatness leave lasting impressions on observers and readers, as this one did on Douglass. It is also, however, a melancholy reminder that Lincoln’s death six weeks later would leave the emancipated millions once again friendless and vulnerable.

“From the first I saw no chance of bettering the condition of the freedman until he should cease to be merely a freedman and should become a citizen. I insisted that there was no safety for him or for anybody else in America outside the American government; that to guard, protect, and maintain his liberty the freedman should have the ballot; that the liberties of the American people were dependent upon the ballot-box, the jury-box, and the cartridge-box; that without these no class of people could live and flourish in this country; and this was now the word for the hour with me, and the word to which the people of the North willingly listened when I spoke. Hence, regarding as I did the elective franchise as the one great power by which all civil rights are obtained, enjoyed, and maintained under our form of government, and the one without which freedom to any class is delusive if not impossible, I set myself to work with whatever force and energy I possessed to secure this power for the recently-emancipated millions.”

Having labored for a quarter-century on behalf of abolitionism, and having realized the fruit of those labors in the passage of the 13th Amendment, Douglass turns his attention to securing civil and voting rights for the Freedmen. His efforts, with those of many others, culminated in the 14th and 15th Amendments, which guaranteed the Freedmen citizenship and enfranchisement, at least nominally.

“The difference in opinion on this question between these two great men was the cause of bitter personal estrangement, and one which I intensely regretted. The truth is, that neither one was entirely just to the other, because neither saw the other in his true character; and having once fallen asunder, the occasion never came when they could be brought together.”

President Ulysses S. Grant supported annexation of Santo Domingo, but Senator Charles Sumner, former abolitionist and fellow Republican, opposed what he considered an act to obliterate an independent Black republic. Douglass sides with Grant, in part because the president proved himself a friend to the cause (as, of course, had Sumner), and in part because Douglass believes that the incorporation of a Black republic into a nation now governed by the letter and spirit of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments can only strengthen the whole.

“It is also due to myself, to make some more emphatic mention than I have yet done, of the honorable women, who have not only assisted me, but who according to their opportunity and ability, have generously contributed to the abolition of slavery, and the recognition of the equal manhood of the colored race. When the true history of the anti-slavery cause shall be written, women will occupy a large space in its pages; for the cause of the slave has been peculiarly woman's cause.”

Notwithstanding barriers to full participation in civic life, women played leading roles in the moral crusade against slavery. American heroes Abby Kelley, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Sojourner Truth appear in these pages, as do their spiritual counterparts in Great Britain, women such as Miss Ellen Richardson and Mrs. Anna Richardson, who helped raise money to purchase Douglass’s freedom.

“Fifty years have passed since I entered upon that work, and now that it is ended, I find myself summoned again by the popular voice and by what is called the negro problem, to come a second time upon the witness stand and give evidence upon disputed points concerning myself and my emancipated brothers and sisters who, though free, are yet oppressed and are in as much need of an advocate as before they were set free.”

Knowing as they do that the legal end of segregation lay deep into the 20th century, readers might well regard this quotation as one of the book’s melancholier passages. Far from advancing toward full political and social equality, America in the 1880s appeared to be drifting in the other direction. This fact, more than any other, explains why Douglass wrote the book’s third part.

“The incident was valuable as showing that the sentiment of the nation was more liberal towards the colored man in proportion to its proximity, in point of time, to the war and to the period when his services were fresh in its memory, for his condition is affected by his nearness to or remoteness from the time when his services were rendered. The imperfections of memory, the multitudinous throngs of events, the fading effects of time upon the national mind, and the growing affection of the loyal nation for the late rebels, will, on the page of our national history, obscure the negro's part, though they can never blot it out entirely, nor can it be entirely forgotten.”

At the 1881 inauguration of President James Garfield, Douglass, serving as United States Marshal of the District of Columbia, escorted both the outgoing and incoming presidents from the Senate chamber. The ceremonial task pales in comparison to Douglass’s lifelong moral and intellectual achievements, yet it merits recollection if only because it demonstrates that American attitudes toward Back people were less harsh even in 1881 than they had become by the early 1890s, when Douglass began writing the book’s third part.

“If it is a bill for social equality, so is the Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men have equal rights; so is the Sermon on the Mount; so is the golden rule that commands us to do to others as we would that others should do to us; so is the teaching of the Apostle that of one blood God has made all nations to dwell on the face of the earth; so is the Constitution of the United States, and so are the laws and customs of every civilized country in the world; for nowhere, outside of the United States, is any man denied civil rights on account of his color.”

Douglass inserts a number of his own speeches, particularly later in the book. The passage quoted here was the final paragraph in Douglass’s speech denouncing the 1883 Supreme Court ruling that effectively denied the federal government the power to enforce its own 1875 Civil Rights Act, made in conformity with the 14th Amendment. It was the beginning of an era marked by legal segregation based on color.

“We saw in Lyons, too, a grand French military display, twenty thousand men in procession, rank upon rank with their glittering steel and splendid uniform, with all the pomp and circumstance of glorious war, a spectacle at once brilliant and sad to behold. Soldiers and slaughter go together.”

A passing observation that occurred to Douglass on his final trip to Europe, this quotation, published in 1892, bears mentioning here not because it has any special relevance to Douglass’s life but because of its prescience in forecasting the horrors of World War I, still more than 20 years in the future.