Douglass (February 141, 1818 – February 20, 1895) was an American
abolitionist, editor, orator, author, statesman and reformer. Called
"The Sage of Anacostia" and "The Lion of Anacostia,"
Douglass was among the most prominent African Americans of his time,
and one of the most influential lecturers and authors in American
Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, who later became known as
Frederick Douglass, was born a slave in Talbot County, Maryland
near Hillsborough, twelve miles from Easton. He was separated
from his mother, Harriet Bailey, when he was still an infant.
She died when Douglass was about seven years old. The identity
of Douglass' father is obscure; Douglass originally stated that
his father was a white man, perhaps his master, Captain Aaron
Anthony, but later said that he knew nothing of his father's identity.
Anthony died, Douglass was given to Mrs. Lucretia Auld, wife of
Captain Thomas Auld; the young man was sent to Baltimore to serve
the Captain's brother, Hugh Auld. When Douglass was about twelve,
Hugh Auld's wife, Sophia, broke the law by teaching Douglass some
letters of the alphabet. Thereafter, as detailed in his Narrative
of the Life of an American Slave (published in 1845), Douglass
succeeded in learning to read from white children in the neighborhood
in which he lived, and by observation of writings of the men with
whom he worked. Douglass later referred to the lessons he received
from Sophia Auld in his first abolitionist speech.
1837, Douglass met Anna Murray, who sold a poster bed to buy sailor's
papers needed for Frederick Douglass's escape. Douglass escaped
slavery on September 3, 1838 boarding a train to Havre de Grace,
Maryland dressed in a sailor's uniform and carrying identification
papers provided by a free black seaman. After crossing the Susquehanna
River by ferry boat at Havre de Grace, Douglass continued by train
to Wilmington, Delaware. From there Douglass went by steamboat
to "Quaker City" Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His escape
to freedom eventually led him to New York, the entire journey
taking less than twenty-four hours.
continued reading. He joined various organizations in New Bedford,
including a black church. He regularly attended Abolitionist meetings.
He subscribed to William Lloyd Garrison's weekly journal, the
Liberator, and in 1841, he heard Garrison speak at the Bristol
Anti-Slavery Society's annual meeting. Douglass was inspired by
Garrison, later stating, "no face and form ever impressed
me with such sentiments (the hatred of slavery) as did those of
William Lloyd Garrison." Garrison was likewise impressed
with Douglass, and mentioned him in the Liberator.
days later, Douglass gave his first speech at the Massachusetts
Anti-Slavery Society's annual convention in Nantucket Island.
Twenty-three years old at the time, Douglass later said that his
legs were shaking. He conquered his nervousness and gave an eloquent
speech about his life as a slave.
1843, Douglass participated in the American Anti-Slavery Society's
Hundred Conventions project, a six month tour of meeting halls
throughout the east and middle west of the United States. He participated
in the Seneca Falls Convention, the birthplace of the American
feminist movement, and was a signatory of its Declaration of Sentiments.
later became the publisher of a series of newspapers: "The
North Star", "Frederick Douglass Weekly", "Frederick
Douglass' Paper", "Douglass' Monthly" and "New
National Era". The motto of "The North Star" was
"Right is of no sex--Truth is of no color--God is the Father
of us all, and we are all Brethren".
work spanned the years prior to and during the Civil War. He was
acquainted with the radical abolitionist Captain John Brown but
did not approve of Brown's plan to start an armed slave revolt.
However, Brown visited in Douglass home for several days shortly
before the Harper's Ferry incident. And, after the Harper's Ferry
incident, Douglass fled for a time to Canada, fearing he might
be arrested as a co-conspirator. Douglass believed that the Harpers
Ferry attack on federal property would enrage the American public.
Douglass would later share a stage in Harpers Ferry with Andrew
Hunter, the prosecutor who successfully convicted Brown.
conferred with President Abraham Lincoln in 1863 on the treatment
of black soldiers, and with President Andrew Johnson on the subject
of black suffrage. His early collaborators were the white abolitionists
William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips. In the early 1850's,
however, Douglass split with the Garrisonians over the issue of
the United States Constitution.
had five children; two of them, Charles and Rossetta, helped produce
was an ordained minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
Douglass' most well-known work is his autobiography, Narrative
of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, which was
published in 1845. Critics frequently attacked the book as inauthentic,
not believing that a black man could possibly have produced so
eloquent a piece of literature. The book was an immediate bestseller
and received overwhelmingly positive critical reviews. Within
three years of its publication, it had been reprinted nine times
with 11,000 copies circulating in the United States; it was also
translated into the French and Dutch languages.
book's success had an unfortunate side effect: his friends and
mentors feared that the publicity would draw the attention of
his ex-owner, Hugh Auld, who could try to get his "property"
back. They encouraged him to go on a tour in Ireland, as many
other ex-slaves had done in the past. He set sail on the Cambria
for Liverpool on August 16, 1845, and arrived in Ireland when
the Irish famine was just beginning.
Douglass spent two years in the British Isles and gave several
lectures, mainly in Protestant churches. He remarked that there
he was treated not "as a color, but as a man." He met
and befriended the Irish nationalist Daniel O'Connell. When Douglass
visited Scotland, the members of the Free Church of Scotland,
whom he had criticized for accepting money from U.S. slave-owners,
demonstrated against him with placards that read "Send back
the nigger". Douglass' work on Catholic emancipation in Ireland
earned him the nickname "The Black O'Connell". He was
widely respected for his championing of many forms of equality;
not only slavery and race equality but women's rights and, in
Ireland, Catholic emancipation.
North Star Press
In 1847, Douglass founded a New York newspaper called The North
Star, which focused on opposing race and sex discrimination, especially
concerning slavery. One evening, a group of men burst into the
office and menacingly approached one of the printing presses.
Douglass reached it before they did, saying, "You can smash
this place and I'll open my paper elsewhere. Stop me, and others
will take my place. You came here to destroy my paper? Let me
help you." Douglass then smashed the printing press himself.
"You can smash machines, but you can't smash ideas."
Ashamed, the men filtered out.
In 1851, Douglass merged the North Star with Gerrit Smith's Liberty
Party Paper to form Frederick Douglass' Paper, which was published
until 1860. Douglass came to agree with Smith and Lysander Spooner
that the United States Constitution is an anti-slavery document,
reversing his earlier belief that it was pro-slavery, a view he
had shared with William Lloyd Garrison.
had publicly demonstrated his opinion of the Constitution by burning
copies of it. Douglass' change of position on the Constitution
was one of the most notable incidents of a division that emerged
in the abolitionist movement after the publication of Spooner's
book The Unconstitutionality of Slavery in 1846. This shift in
opinion, as well as some other political differences, created
a rift between Douglass and Garrison.
further angered Garrison by saying that the Constitution could
and should be used as an instrument in the fight against slavery.
With this, Douglass began to assert his independence in the Garrisonians.
Garrison saw the North Star as being in competition with the National
Anti-Slavery Standard and Marius Robinson's Anti-slavery Bugle.
March 1860, Annie, Douglass' youngest daughter, died at Rochester,
New York, while he was still in England. Douglass returned from
England the following month, taking the route through Canada to
the time of the Civil War, Douglass was one of the most famous
black men in the country, known for his oratories on the condition
of the black race, and other issues such as women's rights.
At Lincoln's memorial, Douglass was in the audience as a tribute
to Lincoln was being given by a prominent lawyer at the time.
The tribute was not as successful as some of the audience there
would have hoped. Resultantly Douglass was goaded by the people
to stand up and speak. At first out of respect for the speaker
he declined but eventually he gave into the pressure and with
no preparation he gave a fantastic tribute to the President he
had so much respect for.
crowd, roused by his speech gave him a standing ovation. A witness
later said: "I have heard Clay speak and many fantastic men,
but never have I heard a speech as impressive as that." Whilst
this is anecdotal, it is a commonly accepted fact that Lincoln's
wife gave to Douglass Lincoln's favourite walking stick which
to this day resides in Cedar Lodge. This is a both testimony to
the success of Douglass' tribute to Lincoln and also to the effect
and influence of his powerful oratory.
After the Civil War, Douglass held a number of important political
positions. He served as President of the Reconstruction-era Freedman's
Savings Bank; as marshal of the District of Columbia; as minister-resident
and consul-general to the Republic of Haiti (1889-1891); and as
chargé d'affaires for Saint Domingue. After two years,
he resigned his ambassadorship due to disagreements with U.S.
government policy. In 1872, he moved to Washington, D.C after
his house on South Avenue in Rochester, New York burned down —
arson was suspected. Also lost was a complete issue of The North
1868, Douglass supported the presidential campaign of Ulysses
S. Grant. The Klan Act and the Enforcement Act were signed into
law by President Grant. Grant used their provisions vigorously,
suspending habeas corpus in South Carolina and sending troops
there and into other states; under his leadership, over 5,000
arrests were made and the Ku Klux Klan was dealt a serious blow.
vigor in disrupting the Klan made him unpopular among many whites,
but Frederick Douglass praised him. An associate of Douglass wrote
of Grant that African Americans "will ever cherish a grateful
remembrance of his name, fame and great services."
1872, he became the first African American to receive a nomination
for Vice President of the United States, having been nominated
to be Victoria Woodhull's running mate on the Equal Rights Party
ticket without his knowledge. During the campaign, he neither
campaigned for the ticket nor even acknowledged that he had been
spoke at many schools around the country in the Reconstruction
era, including Bates College in Lewiston, Maine in 1873
In 1877, Frederick Douglass purchased his final home in Washington
D.C., on the banks of the Anacostia River. He named it Cedar Hill
(also spelled CedarHill). He expanded the house from 14 to 21
rooms and included a china closet. One year later, Douglass expanded
his property to 15 acres (61,000 m²), with the purchase of
adjoining lots. The home is now the location of the Frederick
Douglass National Historic Site.
the disappointments of Reconstruction, many African Americans
called Exodusters moved to Kansas to form all-black towns. Douglass
spoke out against the movement, urging blacks to stick it out.
He was condemned and booed by black audiences.
1877, Douglass was appointed a United States Marshal. In 1881,
he was appointed Recorder of Deeds for the District of Columbia.
His wife (Anna Murray Douglas) died in 1882, leaving him in a
state of depression. His association with the activist Ida B.
Wells brought meaning back into his life. In 1884, Douglass married
Helen Pitts, a white feminist from Honeoye, New York. Pitts was
the daughter of Gideon Pitts, Jr., an abolitionist colleague and
friend of Douglass. A graduate of Mount Holyoke College (at that
time Mount Holyoke Female Seminary), Pitts had worked on a radical
feminist publication named Alpha while living in Washington, D.C..
and Helen Pitts Douglass faced a storm of controversy as a result
of their marriage. She was a white woman and nearly 20 years younger
than he. Both families recoiled; hers stopped speaking to her;
his was bruised, as they felt his marriage was a repudiation of
their mother. But individualist feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton
congratulated the two.
new couple traveled to England, France, Italy, Egypt and Greece
from 1886 to 1887.
later life, Douglass determined to ascertain his birthday. He
was born in February of 1816 by his own calculations, but historians
have found a record indicating his birth in February of 1818.
1892 the Haitian government appointed Douglass as its commissioner
to the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition. He spoke for Irish
Home Rule and on the efforts of Charles Stewart Parnell. He briefly
revisited Ireland in 1886.
On February 20, 1895, Douglass attended a meeting of the National
Council of Women in Washington, D.C.. During that meeting, he
was brought to the platform and given a standing ovation by the
after he returned home, Frederick Douglass died of a massive heart
attack or stroke in his adopted hometown of Washington D.C.. He
is buried in Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, NY.
1921, Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity made a pilgrimage to Douglass'
home in Anacostia and presented a shingle to the Frederick Douglass
Historical and Memorial Society designating Frederick Douglass
as an exalted honorary member of Omega chapter. He holds the distinction
of being the only member initiated posthumously.
church of this country is not only indifferent to the wrongs of
the slave, it actually takes sides with the oppressors.... For
my part, I would say, welcome infidelity! Welcome atheism! Welcome
anything! in preference to the gospel, as preached by these Divines!
They convert the very name of religion into an engine of tyranny
and barbarous cruelty, and serve to confirm more infidels, in
this age, than all the infidel writings of Thomas
and Bolingbroke put together have done!
who profess to favor freedom, yet deprecate agitation, are men
who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without
thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful
roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or
it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical;
but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand.
It never did and it never will.
regard to the colored people, there is always more that is benevolent,
I perceive, than just, manifested towards us. What I ask for the
negro is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simply justice.
The American people have always been anxious to know what they
shall do with us.... I have had but one answer from the beginning.
Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the
mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain
on the tree of their own strength, if they are worm-eaten at the
core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall!
... And if the negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall
also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs!
Let him alone! ... Your interference is doing him positive injury.