Life and Times of Frederick Douglass

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1881

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Part 3, Chapters 8-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 3: “Third Part”

Part 3, Chapter 8 Summary: “European Tour”

Douglass returned to Great Britain with his wife in September 1886, this time as part of a grand tour of Europe and beyond. He reflects on the places he saw and especially the people he met there more than 40 years earlier. These are the melancholy reflections of age, for the “places are there, but the people are gone” (473). Two very notable exceptions were Miss Ellen Richardson and Mrs. Anna Richardson, who once raised money to purchase Douglass’s freedom in America. This brief chapter sets the stage for much lengthier and more detailed recollections in Chapter 9.

Part 3, Chapter 9 Summary: “Continuation of European Tour”

Douglass fills this chapter with observations and reflections upon his journey from Paris to Egypt, highlighted by a trip to Rome.

Between Paris and Rome, Douglass and his wife visit Fontainebleau, one-time hunting retreat for kings and nobles; Avignon, “once the scene of pontifical magnificence” (479); Arles, an ancient town boasting an amphitheater reminiscent of the Roman Coliseum; Marseilles, site of the Chateau D’If, made notorious by Alexander Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo; Genoa, known throughout the Western world as Columbus’s birthplace; and Pisa, with its famous learning tower.

The Douglasses arrive in Rome in the middle of the night and unfortunately “landed in the new part of the city” (485), which looks and sounds like any other. The morning light, however, brings into view “the Eternal City,” which “fully gave us all it had promised, banished every feeling of disappointment, and filled our minds with ever-increasing wonder and amazement” (485). They see the Pantheon, “built twenty-seven years before the songs of the angels were heard on the plains of Bethlehem” (486); the Coliseum, “an ancient hall of human horrors” (487); the Pincian Hill and the Janiculum, two of the seven hills, the spectacular views from which “will dwell in the mind forever” (488); and the awe-inspiring sights of St. Peter’s and the Vatican.

On the journey south from Rome, they see “white vapor from the summit of Vesuvius, slowly and majestically rising against the blue Italian sky and before gentle northern and land breezes grandly moving off to sea, a thing of wonder” (490). From Naples, they sail for Egypt, through the Suez Canal, and then by locomotive arrive in the “land of the Pharaohs” (494). Seventy years old, Douglass nonetheless scales the highest pyramid, which presents a view that inspires “in one who beholds it for the first time thoughts and feeling never thought and felt before” (497).

Part 3, Chapters 8-9 Analysis

Time has not diminished Douglass’s fondness for the people of Great Britain, who once welcomed him and showed him none of the prejudice that still infected minds and hearts in America. Some of Douglass’s observations are the sort of comments any astounded traveler might make while visiting the most famous locations and seeing the most evocative sights a continent has to offer. Other reflections, however, serve the book’s larger purpose, never far from Douglass’s mind.

The first category of observations includes Douglass’s viewing of a French military display that strikes him as ominous, Paganini’s violin at the Museum of Genoa, and the remnants of “ease and luxury” that explain Rome’s decline (486). From Mount Vesuvius and the buried cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum to the modern Suez Canal to the ancient and breathtaking wonders of the Valley of the Nile, Douglass takes in many sights worthy of his glittering prose.

A second and more heartbreaking series of observations follows from Douglass’s perpetual cognizance of the Black person’s plight in America. In France and Italy he sees women “carrying the burdens on the head” (478), a presumed sign of inferiority that Douglass happily reports as “proof of a common brotherhood” (478). The papal splendor of Avignon inspires a similar train of reflections:

Many pious souls today hate the negro while they think they love the Lord. A difference of religion in the days of this old palance did for a man what a difference of color does for him in some quarters at this day; and though light has not dawned upon the color question as upon freedom of thought, it is to be hoped that it soon will (481).

Finally, Douglass admits “an ethnological purpose” in his trip to Egypt, which he hoped would refute “American prejudice against the darker colored races of mankind, and at the same time to raise the colored people somewhat in their own estimation and thus stimulate them to higher endeavors” (491).