Douglass, Frederick

By: David W. Blight

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

Douglass, Frederick

Sex:  Male

Born:  Near Easton, Talbot County, Maryland, United States, Holme Hill Farm
c. February 1818

Died:  Anacostia, Washington, District of Columbia, United States, Cedar Hill (private home)
20 February 1895

Activity/Profession:  Abolitionist, Slave, Civil Rights Activist, Newspaper Editor / Publisher

(b. February 1818; d. 20 February 1895),
the most important African American leader and intellectual of the nineteenth century.

Frederick Douglass lived for twenty years as a slave and nearly nine years as a fugitive slave. From the 1840s to his death in 1895 he attained international fame as an abolitionist, editor, orator, statesman, and the author of three autobiographies that became classics of the slave narrative tradition. Douglass lived to see the Emancipation of the slaves during the Civil War and made a major contribution to interpreting the meaning of those epochal events. He labored for the establishment of black civil rights and witnessed their betrayal during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age. He advocated women's rights long before they were achieved.

It took nearly a century after his death for Douglass's work to receive widespread attention in school curriculums and in the scholarly fields of literature and history. With the flowering of African American history and culture in the 1960s, and a greatly increased attention to slavery, Douglass's autobiographies rose from obscurity and finally came back into print. By the early 2000s Douglass had become a common image in American history textbooks, and his speeches and other writings were more widely known. Along with Martin Luther King Jr. and W. E. B. Du Bois in the twentieth century and Harriet Tubman in his own time, Douglass attained an iconic position as a black person in America's pantheon of heroic figures. Reaching that lofty position was a long, hard journey through the thickets of racism and many changes in American history.

From Slave to Fugitive

Douglass was born on Holme Hill Farm along Tuckahoe Creek in Talbot County, on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Named Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, he was the son of Harriet Bailey and, in all likelihood, her white master, and he came into the world in the cabin of his grandmother, Betsey Bailey. At age six Frederick was sent to live on Wye Plantation, owned by Colonel Edward Lloyd, the largest slaveholder in Maryland. During his two years at Wye Plantation, which he called the Great House Farm, Frederick saw his mother occasionally and for the last time in 1825; she died the following year. Douglass never knew the accurate identity of his father, although circumstantial evidence indicates that it was probably either his first owner, Aaron Anthony, or his second owner, Thomas Auld.

Because he was bequeathed to Auld on Anthony's death in 1826, Douglass was in the fullest sense an orphan from the age of eight. In 1827 Frederick was sent to live in Baltimore to be a companion for a white boy, Tommy Auld, Thomas Auld's nephew and the son of Hugh and Sophia Auld. During those formative years in a slaveholding city—yet one with a large free black population and many influences and opportunities a slave boy would never have encountered on Maryland's Eastern Shore—Frederick learned to read and write and to explore his remarkable gifts for curiosity and language. He also underwent a religious conversion and discovered a remarkable book, The Columbian Orator, a manual of oratory and a collection of speeches and dialogues from antiquity and the Enlightenment with an antislavery tone.

In 1833 Frederick was sent back to the town of Saint Michaels on the Eastern Shore to live in the home of his owner, Thomas Auld. By January 1834, finding the growing teenager to be more than he could handle, Auld hired him out to Edward Covey, a slave owner known for disciplining unruly young slaves. Under Covey's brutal regime, Frederick suffered many beatings, but in August 1834 the sixteen-year-old slave stood up to the hired master and fought him in a bloody brawl. Douglass would later immortalize the fight with Covey in his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845). Fashioning the story as his personal resurrection from psychological bondage, Douglass relates that Covey never laid a hand or a whip on him again after the fight.

Frederick Douglass, in an engraved portrait that was the frontispiece for his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 1845.

University of Rochester Library, Rare Books and Special Collections.

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In early 1835 Frederick was hired out as a field hand to yet another master, William Freeland, who did not subject him to physical punishment and allowed the brilliant young slave to conduct a Sabbath school among a band of “noble souls,” his fellow teenage slaves, in which they practiced oratory and recited biblical passages. In April 1836 an escape plot that hatched among this band of brothers was betrayed and discovered. Frederick and his friends were jailed in Easton, Maryland, and the future abolitionist had every reason to think that he would be “sold south” to an obscure fate on a cotton plantation somewhere in Georgia or Alabama. However, for reasons that remain a mystery, his owner, Thomas Auld, sent Frederick back to Baltimore with the promise that after good behavior he would be freed on his twenty-first birthday.

The disgruntled young slave, inspired by language, Old Testament stories he had come to cherish, a rebellious spirit, and some good fortune, decided not to wait for the tenuous promise of his future freedom. Working as a caulker in the Baltimore shipyards from 1836 to 1838, Frederick met a young free black woman named Anna Murray who helped him plot his escape and would later become his wife. On 3 September 1838, at the age of twenty, Frederick fled slavery by train and by boat. Dressed in a sailor's clothing and with sailor's protection papers obtained from a friend, he fled across rivers and through great dangers to arrive first in Philadelphia and then in New York, where Anna joined him and where they were married on 15 September. The couple abruptly moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts, an enclave for fugitive slaves. Shortly after his arrival, Frederick adopted a new surname, Douglass, from the hero in Sir Walter Scott's novel The Lady of the Lake.

Several Lives in One

At the end of Douglass's third autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881, 1892), he declares that he had lived several lives in one: “First, the life of slavery; secondly, the life of a fugitive from slavery; thirdly, the life of comparative freedom; fourthly, the life of conflict and battle; and fifthly, the life of victory, if not complete, at least assured.” With an autobiographer's pride, Douglass wanted to demonstrate the struggle and achievement in his life. He had suffered and overcome, he insists. He had persevered through the potential hopelessness of a slave's early life, led his people ultimately through a great trial, and in the end reached at least a personal triumph. These are the images of an aging man summing up his life and attempting to control his historical reputation. Douglass's categories reveal his self-image as the fugitive slave who had risen to racial and national leader, the person and the nation regenerated in the crucible of the Civil War.

Like all great autobiographers, Douglass was trying to order the passage of time and thereby make sense of his own past. However, the stages through which Douglass envisioned his life are instructive. They represent many of the turning points that define his illustrious career. No chronology can convey the deeper meanings in such an eventful life. Douglass may have said this best himself in a speech titled “Life Pictures,” first delivered in 1861. The final lines of that speech may have been unwittingly autobiographical. “We live in deeds, not years,” said Douglass, “in thoughts, not breaths, in feeling, not fingers on a dial. We should count time by heartthrobs; he most lives who thinks the most, feels the noblest, acts the best.”

These five stages of a seventy-seven-year life help clarify Douglass's changing place in the course of American history in the nineteenth century. Beyond his lifetime his significance can be comprehended in three additional ways. He is likely to always be remembered first for his heroic life, as the slave who willed his own freedom; fashioned a dramatic career as an activist and, later, a sagelike statesman; and emerged as a true “representative man” in a century that admired such figures. Second, he remains important as an artist—a writer and orator of uncommon skill and penetrating analysis of America's struggle over slavery and race—and as the narrator of his own story, the first two versions of which, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and My Bondage and My Freedom, are considered masterpieces of the literary American renaissance. Third, he endures as a thinker, important for his insights into both the alienation of blacks from and their embrace of America's ideals. No one ever exposed America's hypocrisy of sustaining slavery while celebrating freedom quite like Douglass. As activist, artist, and thinker, Douglass exemplifies the best and the worst in the American spirit, of slavery and freedom in a land of promise and contradiction.

Heroic Life

In his first two years living as a free man in New Bedford, Massachusetts, Douglass worked as a day laborer in the shipyard. He joined the African Methodist Episcopal Church, where he tried out his oratorical skills and became a class leader and local preacher. His first speech was an address condemning African colonization, the movement to persuade black Americans to immigrate to West Africa. Between 1839 and 1849 Douglass and his wife, Anna, had five children: Rosetta (b. 1839), Lewis (b. 1840), Frederick Jr. (b. 1842), Charles (b. 1844), and Annie (b. 1849). The growing family was close but placed a heavy burden on Anna because Douglass traveled frequently to lecture and participate in abolitionist activities across the American North and in Great Britain.

In August 1841 William Lloyd Garrison, the radical leader of the American Anti-Slavery Society, invited Douglass to deliver his first public abolitionist speech at a meeting on Nantucket Island, off the Massachusetts coast. At that gathering Douglass felt that he carried a “severe cross” as he spoke about his life to white people, but he made a powerful impression with both his story and his style. Garrison's organization hired him, and for the next three years Douglass launched his professional life as an orator and abolitionist. From 1841 to 1844, on countless antislavery platforms, the former slave told his stories of witnessing as a child the beating of his aunt Hester and the murder of a runaway slave by a cruel overseer, fighting with Covey until the slave breaker would harm him no more, discovering language and the fearful but liberating power of literacy, observing the damage that slavery did to the souls and psyches of slaveholders, and pursuing his overwhelming desire as a youth to gain his freedom. In these speeches Douglass told many of the episodes he would later connect in his Narrative. He spoke with such eloquence and knowledge that many members of his audiences did not believe that he had ever been a slave. Thus, after moving to Lynn, Massachusetts, Douglass wrote his first autobiography in late 1844, in part to declare just who he was in accurate terms but also to probe for himself and for his readers what freedom means when one understands its most brutal denials.

In February 1844 Nathaniel Rogers, the editor of the abolitionist paper Herald of Freedom, watched Douglass deliver two speeches in Concord, New Hampshire, and recorded his impressions. Rogers heard Douglass attack the hypocrisy of American churches that supported slavery. He listened as the black abolitionist described himself a “fugitive not from slavery—but in slavery” and called his New England hosts “enslavers,” complicit with his former owners in the South. Douglass recited episodes that would soon appear in his Narrative but concluded, in Rogers's stunned observation, like “an insurgent slave taking hold on the right of speech, and charging on his tyrants the bondage of his race.” Rogers found Douglass the orator both “fearful and magnificent.” Douglass was an angry young man trying to use language to represent and to control his own pain. According to Rogers, Douglass “let out the outraged humanity that was laboring in him. … It was the volcanic outbreak of human nature long pent up in slavery and at last bursting its imprisonment.” These descriptions of Douglass as a young orator capture some of the ways that language became the former slave's only real weapon of both self-revelation and advocacy against slavery on behalf of his people. Douglass mastered words, written and spoken, as had few other Americans in his generation from any background.

As the twenty-seven-year-old fugitive reimagines his “dark night of slavery” while in Covey's custody, he fashions in his Narrative an unforgettable metaphor of freedom. After months of beatings and unrelenting hard labor, Douglass relates that he considered himself “broken in body, soul, and spirit.” Describing himself as a nearly suicidal teenager, Douglass the writer probes his memory for the contrast of beauty with wretchedness that allowed him to dream. “Our house stood within a few rods of the Chesapeake Bay,” he remembers, “whose broad bosom was ever white with sails from every quarter of the habitable globe.” Douglass then captures slavery and freedom with unparalleled artistry in the genre of slave narratives:

"Those beautiful vessels, robed in purest white, so delightful to the eye of freemen, were to me so many shrouded ghosts, to terrify and torment me with thoughts of my wretched condition. I have often, in the deep stillness of a summer's Sabbath, stood all alone upon the lofty banks of that noble bay, and traced, with saddened heart and tearful eye, the countless number of sails moving off to the mighty ocean. The sight of these always affected me powerfully. My thoughts would compel utterance; and there, with no audience but the Almighty, I would pour out my soul's complaint, in my rude way, with an apostrophe to the moving multitude of ships."

(Blight, p. 83) Douglass then shifts and speaks directly to the ships, trying to reenter a teenager's voice:

"You are loosed from your moorings and are free; I am fast in my chains, and am a slave! You move merrily before the gentle gale, and I sadly before the bloody whip! You are freedom's swift-winged angels, that fly around the world; I am confined in bands of iron! O that I were free! O that I were on one of your gallant decks and under your protecting wing! Alas, betwixt me and you, the turbid waters roll."

(Blight, p. 84)

In such poetry Douglass wrote a psalm-like prayer of deliverance in his Narrative, rendering in the music of words the meaning of slavery's potential to destroy the human spirit but at the same time transcending his misery to declare at the end of his lament, in language reminiscent of the slave spirituals, that “there is a better day coming.” Douglass's “heroism” was moral as much as physical, and it manifested in his ability to tell a story that was itself the best argument against slavery Americans had ever read. Douglass proved that language, in a society that valued it, could be a form of actual liberation. The slave who could tell his ascension story from bondage, and could wield words back at his former masters, could also achieve a certain degree of power and a new place for blacks in America.

After publishing his Narrative in 1845, Douglass sailed for the British Isles aboard the ship Cambria, where he was forced to accept second-class passage and where American passengers nearly mobbed him for delivering an abolitionist speech. Douglass arrived safely in Liverpool and then traveled to Ireland, where he spent three triumphant months lecturing in Cork, Dublin, and Belfast and where an Irish edition of his book was published and sold widely. Through 1846 and into early 1847 Douglass toured Scotland and England, speaking to large crowds in a celebrated lecture campaign that established him as the most sought-after American reformer. Douglass amazed his audiences in Britain and was treated more kindly and with far less racism there than he had been in the United States. He became the most prominent in a long line of African American reformers, speakers, and fugitives who found British society more open to their color, their plight, and their ideas.

As Douglass returned to America, a group of his British antislavery friends arranged for the purchase of his freedom from Thomas Auld for 150 pounds ($711). On his return to Massachusetts, Douglass decided to move his wife, Anna, and their burgeoning family west, to Rochester, New York. He hoped for a new beginning, a geographical and ideological break from the grip of William Lloyd Garrison and his antislavery network in New England. Douglass needed independence for his fertile mind and, he hoped, for his new career as he began what he called his “life of comparative freedom.”

Douglass was on his own as he launched a newspaper, the North Star, first published on 3 December 1847. It would go through two more names, Frederick Douglass' Paper and Douglass' Monthly, and over the next sixteen years became the longest-lasting black abolitionist paper in the United States. Douglass became a tireless and innovative editor, although his paper always struggled to make ends meet. To keep it afloat, he received editorial assistance from Julia Griffiths, an Englishwoman Douglass had met during his British tour and who lived in Rochester between 1848 and 1851. He also received considerable sums of money to help underwrite the paper from the wealthy New York abolitionist Gerrit Smith. During these years Douglass shifted ideologically from the moral suasion of the Garrisonians to the political abolitionism of Smith's Upstate New York circle of activists. He came under the sway of colleagues and events that pushed him away from Garrison's tutelage. Garrison was deeply admired among northern free blacks and fugitive slaves for his genuine support of their civil rights. His radicalism against slavery gave hope to many blacks who wondered if they would ever have a future in America. However, Garrison's doctrinaire insistence on nonvoting (not participating in a political system that countenanced slavery), on nonresistance (pacifism), on the U.S. Constitution as a proslavery document and therefore altogether hostile to the antislavery cause, and on moral suasion (appealing to the heart and not the law of economic interest) as the only proper ways to attack the peculiar institution were no longer fulfilling to many black abolitionists.

Douglass was the leader of a new generation of black abolitionists, many of whom had been born in slavery, had escaped through some pathway of the legendary Underground Railroad, and had become pragmatic activists. The new generation included Harriet Tubman, Henry Highland Garnet, William Wells Brown, Ellen and William Craft, John Sella Martin, and many others. Wearing the experience of slavery on their backs and in their souls, they were less committed to philosophical abstractions like antipolitics and nonviolence than were white abolitionists. Some embraced almost any strategy against slavery and for free black rights that they thought might work. If the Constitution could be appropriated to the cause of abolition, even if largely in political and rhetorical ways, so be it. And if violent means could free people, then many black abolitionists accepted their necessity and looked for allies who might help them. By 1851 Douglass broke personally and philosophically with Garrison and became a full-blown political abolitionist who was willing to join political parties, harbor fugitive slaves and help them on the path to Canada, and forge alliances with violent radicals.

During the 1850s Douglass's political education took many significant turns. None was more important than his and other abolitionists' response to the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. As part of the Compromise of 1850 the law established a much stricter judicial process by which escaped slaves in the North had to be returned to their former owners. The fleeing slave, desperate for safety and freedom, had become one of the most prominent images and realities evoked by abolitionists, and the new threat of capture radicalized many activists at the same time that it drove thousands of fugitives to move to Canada.

Numerous reports of fugitives rescued from slave catchers in the wake of the new law led many former nonresistants into acts of courage and violence. In 1851 Douglass harbored the three black fugitives who had killed one of their pursuers in Christiana, Pennsylvania. By rail the fugitives fled to Douglass's home in Rochester. He fed and sheltered them and then, with Julia Griffiths's assistance, drove them in his carriage to the Genessee River, where they boarded a steamer for Toronto. To Douglass the Christiana fugitives were “heroic defenders of the just rights of man against manstealers and murderers.” On the deck of the ship, just before departure to safety in Canada, one of the fugitives gave Douglass a revolver as a token of gratitude. He cherished the memento that had been taken from the hand of the dead slave catcher in Christiana.

Douglass in a portrait photograph. Douglass was in his early twenties when the daguerreotype was invented, and he lived to see photography revolutionize portraiture and take its place as an important and popular technology and as a powerful tool for communication.

University of Rochester Library, Rare Books and Special Collections.

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Increasingly in the 1850s Douglass turned his attention to violent self-defense in the North and to the prospect of slave insurrection in the South. In a column published in 1854 titled “Is It Right and Wise to Kill a Kidnapper?” he not only justified violence in self-defense but also celebrated it. The “slaughter” of a slave catcher, wrote Douglass, “was as innocent in the sight of God, as would be the slaughter of a ravenous wolf in the act of throttling an infant.” In the midst of the controversy over “bleeding Kansas” in 1856, he declared that the “slave's right to revolt is perfect.” He shuddered at the horrors of slave insurrection, but “terrible as it will be,” he admitted, “we accept and hope for it.” In the despair following the Dred Scott decision in 1857, which declared that blacks had no social or legal future in America, Douglass saw slave rebellion as offering at least one path to black liberation. Fearfully, he predicted that “in an awful moment of depression and desperation, the bondman and bondwoman at the South may rush to one wild and deadly struggle for freedom.” Ominously, he announced that he was in “no frame of mind” to see this prospect “long deferred.”

This rhetorical and even personal espousal of violent means against slavery conditioned Douglass to support the plans of the radical and religiously inspired abolitionist John Brown. During his crusade to raise money and men for his ultimate raid on Harpers Ferry, Brown lived for three weeks in February 1858 in the attic apartment of Douglass's home in Rochester. Douglass gave Brown moral support, if not his own service. He knew just enough of Brown's vague plans for capturing the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry and fomenting a slave revolution throughout Virginia to warn the old warrior that he was doomed. Douglass last met with Brown in August 1859 in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. Although he refused to join the ill-fated raid, Douglass brought with him one new recruit, Shields Green, a twenty-five-year-old fugitive slave from Charleston, South Carolina, who, with relatives still trapped in slavery, was willing to give his life to the cause. Douglass seemed to know, however, that his own best work lay ahead of him and that Brown's raid would end, like most attempted slave insurrections, in death and failure. Douglass was willing to support violent means to weaken or destroy slavery, and though he admired Brown's moral fervor, he saw only doom in the old warrior's strategic planning.

In the wake of the October 1859 raid, Douglass fled north into Canada and boarded a steamer headed out the Saint Lawrence River to England. Because of a large cache of letters and other documents found in a trunk Brown had left behind at his hideout in Maryland, Douglass was prominent among the abolitionists implicated in the Harpers Ferry conspiracy. Hence, Douglass escaped from Rochester only a short time before federal marshals arrived to arrest him. As Brown's accomplice, Douglass would spend six months in Britain, returning to America because of the death of his beloved daughter Annie and because the federal government had decided not to make any prosecutions beyond Brown's martyrdom. By June 1860 Douglass had “little hope of the freedom of the slave by peaceful means,” he wrote in a letter. “The only penetrable point of a tyrant,” he said, “is the fear of death. The outcry that they make as to the danger of having their throats cut is because they deserve to have them cut.” Others might lead insurrections, and Douglass would urge them on, but the great orator seemed to understand that his best role was as a leader of insurrectionary thought and political action.

Against the odds, Douglass hoped for a reformist rather than a revolutionary end to slavery. As he took heart at the rising sectional crises over the expansion of slavery into western territories, the turbulent decade of the 1850s saw Douglass embrace antislavery political parties. He attended party conventions and became an active campaigner, first for the Liberty and Free-Soil parties and eventually for the Republicans. With his roots in moral suasion, Douglass could still agonize between an ethical worldview and the realities of political power, between militancy and accommodation. His conversion to political action was part of a gradual ideological transformation to an antislavery interpretation of the Constitution.

Unlike some political abolitionists and Republicans, he was never convinced that the framers' intentions were actually antislavery. However, Douglass adopted the view that the Constitution could be an abolitionist instrument, especially regarding the extension of slavery into the West. He embraced the free-soil doctrine, which became the defining principle of the Republican Party after 1854, that slavery was a creature of local (state) law and freedom a creature of national (federal) law. Hence, Congress could, by its clear authority over the territories, stop the spread of slavery. As early as 1852, at the Free-Soil Party convention, Douglass spoke vehemently for repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law on constitutional grounds and argued that slavery was nothing more than a system of “piracy.” However, Douglass had learned that politics and perfectionism did not always mix. He embraced a hard-earned pragmatism that made him admit in 1856, in an article (“Fremont and Dayton”) in Frederick Douglass' Paper, that the

"time has passed for an honest man to attempt any defence of a right to change his opinion as to political methods of opposing Slavery. … Right Anti-Slavery action is that which deals the … deadliest blow upon slavery that can be given at that particular time. Such action is always consistent, however different may be the forms through which it expresses itself."

(http://www.wlhn.org/dodgeco/histories/douglass/douglass_ writings.htm)

During the presidential election years of 1856 and 1860, Douglass begrudgingly supported the Republican candidates, John C. Frémont and Abraham Lincoln, respectively. In the years between, he threw his allegiance to the Radical Abolitionist Party (and its leader, Gerrit Smith), the small successor of the old Liberty Party. In effect, Douglass had a party for his principles and a party for his hopes, two diverging “paths of duty,” as he described his dilemma. Douglass was troubled by the racist underpinnings of the Republicans' nonextension argument about slavery; for too many white northerners nonextension meant exclusion of blacks from the western territories. Although the Republicans' lack of genuine abolitionism still angered the Rochester editor in the pivotal election of 1860, he sighed and worked for Lincoln's election in the state of New York. Douglass declared that he preferred the “brave and inspiring march of a storming party,” but in its absence he would accept “the slow process of a cautious siege.” To him the ultimate meaning of the Republican Party before secession was in its potential to cause southern reaction and disunion. Southern fears of Lincoln's potential victory, said Douglass, served as “tolerable endorsements of the antislavery tendencies of the Republican party.”

Douglass welcomed the secession of the Deep South states in the wake of Lincoln's election in 1860. The secession winter was a confusing, fearful, and exhilarating time for abolitionists like Douglass. They were the targets of antiabolition mobs who blamed them for causing the disorder that led to disunion. Douglass was the victim of one such mob in Boston on 3 December 1860, when a gang led by hired thugs broke up a meeting at which he was to speak on the first anniversary of the execution of John Brown. Douglass was thrown down a staircase at Tremont Temple but, as a Boston newspaper reported, not before he “fought like a trained pugilist.” In this charged atmosphere the black abolitionist expected that yet another form of compromise would probably still hold the Union together and delay what he most yearned for, a sanctioned war against the South and slavery. The firing on Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor, South Carolina, in April 1861 brought the first of these goals rapidly into reality. It would take nearly two more agonizing years for the second goal of a war for black freedom to materialize.

From the outset of the Civil War, Douglass saw the conflict in abolitionist terms. He urged the Lincoln administration to move aggressively to prosecute a war against slavery and slaveholders. Until well into 1862 the editor turned war propagandist found himself deeply frustrated with federal military policy (called “denial of asylum”) toward fugitive slaves. Union troops were ordered to return those escaped slaves who fled within their lines. Moreover, for the first full year of the war, no black soldiers were admitted into Union forces, rejecting the wishes and overtures of many African American communities and leaders. From the beginning of the war Douglass wanted precisely what Lincoln did not want: a “remorseless revolutionary struggle,” as the president put it, that would make black freedom indispensable to saving the Union. By late 1862, however, in the wake of the September battle of Antietam in Maryland, Lincoln concluded that to defeat the Confederacy, slavery would itself have to be destroyed. Thus, Douglass's views of Lincoln and his emancipation policies moved from cautious support in 1860, to outrage in 1861, and eventually to respect and admiration in 1863. Regarding the Emancipation Proclamation and the recruitment of black troops in late 1862, Douglass was the leading African American voice, urging and cheering on a war that transformed from an effort to save the Union into a struggle for black freedom and the reinvention of the American Republic.

These outcomes of the war, however, were by no means certain until the very end. In 1862 Douglass was offended by the Lincoln administration's plans for colonization of freed people. The administration attempted to recruit Douglass himself to lead the federal effort to relocate thousands of former slaves in foreign lands. The abolitionist vehemently rejected the government's offer, calling colonization, especially at this long-dreamed-of moment of emancipation, a “satanic spirit” and a “miserable philosophy.” Douglass preferred instead to join the effort to recruit men for the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, the first Northern unit of black infantry. The first two recruits were his sons, Lewis and Charles. The proud father was present on a balcony overlooking Beacon Street in Boston in May 1863 as the fated regiment marched toward glory in its send-off from the people of the state that sponsored it. Douglass even boarded the ship at the Boston wharf and accompanied his sons to the outer harbor, stepping off to a small boat and waving as they sailed to South Carolina. Both of Douglass's sons survived the war, and one, Lewis, participated in the famous charge on Fort Wagner outside Charleston, South Carolina, in July 1863. To Douglass the 200,000 black men in the Union ground and naval forces gave the war its most visible and poignant meaning.

Douglass met Lincoln three times. In August 1863, he visited Washington, D.C., for the first time and met with the president for a frank discussion of discriminations practiced against black troops. They hardly agreed on all issues, but Douglass left the meeting impressed with Lincoln's forthrightness and political skill. The second meeting took place in the capital city a year later. With the war in a bloody stalemate in Virginia, Lincoln's reelection was in jeopardy, and that summer Douglass flirted with supporting John C. Frémont's bid to replace the president on the Republican ticket. In August 1864 Lincoln invited the black leader to the White House for an extraordinary discussion. Worried that he might lose the fall election to the Democrat George B. McClellan, Lincoln sought Douglass's advice and help.

The president of the United States asked the most prominent black abolitionist to lead a scheme reminiscent of John Brown and Harpers Ferry. Concerned that if the Democrats won the election, they would pursue a negotiated, proslavery peace, Lincoln, according to Douglass, wanted “to get more of the slaves within our lines.” Toward that end Douglass went north and organized some twenty-five agents willing to work at the front. In a letter to Lincoln dated 29 August 1864 Douglass outlined his plan for this “band of scouts,” channeling slaves northward in an effort to liberate as many as possible before Election Day. Douglass was not convinced that this plan was fully “practicable,” but he was ready to serve. Because military and political fortunes shifted dramatically with the fall of Atlanta to Union forces a week later, this government-sponsored underground railroad never emerged. Nevertheless, how remarkable this episode of cooperative planning must have been to both Douglass and Lincoln, as they worked together to accomplish the very “revolution” that had separated them ideologically in 1861.

Douglass, engraving by J. C. Buttre from a daguerreotype. This image was the frontispiece of Douglass's second autobiography, My Bondage, My Freedom, 1850–1855.

University of Rochester Library, Rare Books and Special Collections.

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The third encounter between Douglass and Lincoln occurred on 4 March 1865 at the president's second inauguration. Standing in the crowd, Douglass heard Lincoln declare slavery the “cause” and emancipation the “result” of the Civil War. He heard Lincoln's determination that to win the war, “every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.” Four years earlier and many times between, Douglass had dreamed of writing that speech for Lincoln. That evening the former slave attended the inaugural reception at the White House, an event that he recorded in Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. At first denied entrance by two policemen, Douglass was admitted only when the president was notified. Weary of a lifetime of such racial rejections, Douglass was immediately set at ease by Lincoln's cordial greeting, “Here comes my friend Douglass.” Lincoln asked Douglass what he thought of the day's speech. Douglass demurred, urging the host to attend to his many visitors. Lincoln insisted, however, telling his black guest, “There is no man in the country whose opinion I value more than yours.” Douglass replied, “Mr. Lincoln, that was a sacred effort.” We can only guess at the thrill in Douglass's heart, knowing that the cause he had so long pleaded might finally come to fruition. He could honestly entertain the belief that he and Lincoln, the slaves and the nation, were walking that night into a new history.

Douglass remembered the immediate aftermath of the Civil War as a time of “vast changes” and personal ambivalence. “I felt that I had reached the end of the noblest and best part of my life,” he lamented in 1881. “The antislavery platform had performed its work, and my voice was no longer needed. Othello's occupation was gone.” Douglass's career was hardly over; he would play new roles in the postwar society as an orator; the editor for four years of the New National Era, a newspaper he took over in 1870 in Washington, D.C.; as the president of the Freedman's Savings and Trust Company in 1874, which folded under his management; and as a Republican Party functionary. During Reconstruction and beyond Douglass's leadership became more emblematic and less activist. President Rutherford B. Hayes appointed him to be the U.S. marshal for the District of Columbia in 1877, and in 1881 he accepted the appointment as the recorder of deeds in the District of Columbia from President James Garfield. In 1889 Douglass became a diplomat when President Benjamin Harrison made him the minister and consul general to Haiti, a post he held until 1891 when he resigned in protest against the United States' designs to seize Môle Saint-Nicolas, a Haitian island.

During the latter third of his life Douglass made a comfortable living, largely from his exhaustive lecture tours and his government positions. In 1872 his home in Rochester burned, under suspicion of arson. He lost many important papers in the fire, and amidst the chaos he decided to move his family to Washington, D.C., where he attempted with mixed results to obtain government jobs for two of his sons. Douglass's wife, Anna, never achieved literacy, despite the urgings of their daughter Rosetta and Douglass himself. Frederick and Anna shared an abiding love, and she was a skilled homemaker and a devoted mother. Nonetheless, their marriage was burdened by many strains. Douglass enjoyed the company of intellectuals, many of whom were women. One in particular, Ottilie Assing, a German woman of Jewish and radical political background, became Douglass's lover. Their relationship was one of friendship and passion. Assing came to America in the late 1850s in search of the author of My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), which she had just read. She lived in New Jersey but occasionally visited Rochester and stayed in the Douglass home. She also contributed money to Rosetta Douglass's education.

In 1878 Douglass purchased Cedar Hill, a large house and fifteen-acre estate on a hill in the Anacostia section of the District of Columbia. Four years later Anna, his wife of forty-four years, died after a long illness. Douglass was emotionally distraught for a time. However, in 1884 he married Helen Pitts, a graduate of Mount Holyoke College who had been his secretary and was white. The marriage caused considerable controversy in the black press and in Douglass's own family. The most famous black man in America had just married a white woman. To the sixty-six-year-old Douglass, however, the fuss was insignificant. In 1885 he and Helen went on a world tour that included England, France, Italy, Egypt, and Greece. Ottilie Assing moved back to Europe and in 1884 committed suicide in a park in Paris. She left much of her estate to Douglass's children. Very few letters survive from Douglass's side of his relationship with Assing; what is known has been derived mostly from her pen. He was a man of enormous pride in his accomplishments and devoted to the welfare of his children; and he loved Anna as his life companion all the way from his slave days in Baltimore to the great house at Cedar Hill. However, his was a complicated, passionate, intellectually expanding life, and Assing, as well as other friends, male and female, nurtured and challenged the nineteenth century's most conspicuous African American leader through his many trials and triumphs.

Orator and Writer

What constitutes the heroic? In Douglass's case, heroism emanated from the very nature of his life. He risked all and engaged in self-sacrifice to escape the bonds of chattel slavery; he was physical property become man. His heroism was of an even deeper kind, however—beyond physical courage. It was a form of moral heroism manifested in language. If America is an idea, no one in the nineteenth century, not even Abraham Lincoln, defined that idea better in the music of words than did Douglass. From an adolescent reading The Columbian Orator and the Bible and a young man lecturing on the abolitionist circuit, Douglass had become one of America's greatest public speakers by the 1850s, as well as the author of memoirs, enduring political analyses, at least one work of fiction, and probing social commentary.

Literacy was forbidden fruit for young slaves, and that is precisely why Douglass so desired to read and write while growing up in Baltimore and on the Eastern Shore. Words represented an unshackling of the spirit and an opening of the mind for the young Douglass. By watching his fellow slaves denied access to language and education, he perceived “the white man's power to enslave the black man,” as he wrote in his Narrative. After his master, Hugh Auld, forbade his mistress, Sophia Auld, from continuing to teach Frederick to read, the twelve-year-old took inspiration from his dilemma. “I set out with high hope,” he wrote in 1845, “and a fixed purpose, at whatever cost of trouble, to learn how to read. … What he [Auld] most dreaded, I most desired.” Although he attended no formal school as a slave youth, from the day in 1830 that he purchased his copy of Caleb Bingham's The Columbian Orator, Douglass possessed the same schoolbook as his white playmates in the streets of Baltimore. That special book had a lasting effect on young Frederick's intellectual and spiritual growth. “Every opportunity I got, I used to read this book,” Douglass recalls in the Narrative.

A best-seller as a school text for several decades after its publication in 1797, The Columbian Orator was both an elocution manual and a collection of some eighty-four selections, including prose, verse, plays, invented dialogues, and political speeches by famous orators from antiquity and the Age of Enlightenment. Most selections dealt with themes of nationalism, individual liberty, religious faith, or the democratic value of education. The book as a whole had an antislavery tone and served Douglass, he later said, as a “powerful denunciation of oppression.” Moreover, from Bingham's introductory essay, “General Directions for Speaking,” Douglass learned that orators and writers are not born of nature; they must practice and harness elements of nature's power and the beauty of words. The Columbian Orator was one of the few possessions Douglass carried with him during his escape from slavery in 1838.

A Voice like No Other

In his early years on the antislavery circuit, Douglass had to achieve a supremely dignified style of expression to gain recognition and respect. At the same time he became a master of the radical, moral, and political language of abolitionism. His speeches from countless platforms in the two decades before the Civil War were hardly polite discourse; they expressed both his own indictment of America's crime of slaveholding and appeals to America's founding creeds. He also became a master of mimicry, the speaker as political entertainer who was skilled at subversive theatrics during a golden age of oratory. He employed every tool in the orator's repertoire: wit, humor, pathos, ridicule, satire, anecdotes, illustrations, and intellectual and emotional appeals. The paradox in the early nineteenth century between democratic and aristocratic eloquence eventually produced no greater example than Douglass, the slave who mastered the master's language and spoke to America as no one else ever had about how the country could reinvent itself if it could imagine a way to destroy slavery.

Douglass's lecturing career spanned fifty-four years, from 1841 to 1895. He usually spoke as an advocate, but he also delivered historical and scientific addresses, and one of his fortes was the ceremonial or commemorative speech. Douglass believed an orator had to have moral force on his side. “Thus armed, a worm can thrash a mountain,” he wrote. “Speech! Speech!” he declared, “the live, calm, grave, clear, pointed, warm, sweet, melodious and powerful human voice is the chosen instrumentality.” His orations often lasted as long as two hours and were delivered without affectation. One observer remarked that Douglass spoke with “the dignity and grace of a courtier, and the bearing of a king.” He was also extraordinarily adept at phrasing that produced lasting aphorisms:

" “There is a meaner thing than a slave, and that is a contented slave.”
“There is nothing slavery dislikes half as much as light.”
“Despotism is wakeful and always on watch.”
“The limits of tyrants are proscribed by those they oppress.”
"

Indeed, one of his most famous statements, delivered in 1857 at the height of the political crisis over slavery, has stood the test of time and numerous protest strategies across the world. “Without struggle there is no progress,” he said. “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

Douglass's address on 5 July 1852 is the rhetorical masterpiece of American abolitionism. He delivered “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” at the invitation of the Rochester Ladies Anti-Slavery Society. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin had just been published that spring and was taking the reading public by storm. For nearly two years at that point the nation had experienced great turmoil over the unresolved Compromise of 1850, especially the infamous Fugitive Slave Law. Several fugitive slave rescues had already occurred in northern communities, some abolitionists were embracing violent means of resistance, and American political parties were on the verge of tearing themselves apart over the expansion of slavery into the West. Douglass must have made his good abolitionist friends in Rochester squirm with discomfort.

In the magnificent speech he used three essential rhetorical moves. First, Douglass set his reformistpatriotic audience at ease, letting them relax amid accolades to the genius of the founding fathers. He called the Fourth of July an American “Passover” and spoke with hope about the nation's youth, that they were “still impressible” and open to change. He called the Declaration of Independence the “ringbolt” of the nation's destiny and urged his listeners to “cling to this day … and to its principles, with the grasp of a storm-tossed mariner to a spar at midnight.”

In his second rhetorical move, his use of pronouns was a warning of what was to follow: the nation is your nation, the fathers your fathers, he declared. The nation's epic story is taught “in your common schools, narrated at your firesides, unfolded from your pulpits.” Douglass began to remind his white audience of their national and personal declension. He reminded them of the biblical story of the children of Jacob boasting of Abraham's paternity but losing Abraham's faith. Then, as though slamming a hammer down on the lectern, Douglass said, “Pardon me … what have I … to do with your national independence?” What then followed was a bitter critique of American hypocrisy regarding slavery and racism. Douglass pulled no punches. As the painful analysis took hold, he issued a litany of accusative pronouns: “This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.” After this classic rhetorical device of reversal, Douglass took his anguished audience into the “sights and scenes” of slavery itself—punishments, sale by traders, denials of the humanity of bondpeople. He implicated the church and the state, and his subject was the evil done by Americans to other Americans. Douglass ended his rhetorical tirade with an apocalyptic warning that his well-churched, Bible-reading audience would have understood: “Oh! Be warned! Be warned! A horrible reptile is coiled up at your nation's bosom; the venomous creature is nursing at the tender breast of your youthful republic; for the love of God, tear away.”

For twenty minutes, Douglass's six hundred listeners must have felt as though they were undergoing a hailstorm of humiliation. Then, in his conclusion—his third move—Douglass eased up on them, wiped their brows for them, and ended on a note of cautious hope. The principles of the Declaration of Independence were still available to be embraced; the founders' best wisdom could still be tapped. It was not yet too late. In an ending that appealed to America's geographic boundlessness, drew on Psalm 68 to declare that blacks will rise on the world's historical stage, and then quoted William Lloyd Garrison's poem “God Speed the Year of Jubilee,” Douglass transported his audience, the hall in which he stood, and almost history itself, into a realm inhabited only by great art. He had used language to move people; he had explained the nation's historical and political condition, and through the pain of his moral indictment, illuminated a path to a better day. In thought and feeling, Douglass the ironist had never been in better form, and the meaning of slavery and freedom in the United States had never been better expressed.

Douglass would deliver many more memorable and oft-quoted speeches—about the meaning of the Civil War, about Reconstruction and its constitutional transformations, about America's potential development of a “composite race,” about the very American idea of the “self-made man,” and about the nature of “race” as a social and biological concept. He would also speak on nearly every major political crisis the nation faced from 1850 to his death in 1895—slavery expansion, secession, black soldiers in the Civil War, major Supreme Court decisions, the relationship of economic to political rights, the exodus of blacks toward the West, the terror of lynching, America's role in the international community of the imperial age, and the majesty of the right to vote. Hardly an issue in American life escaped Douglass's eloquence, and audiences flocked to hear him.

During the final third of his life, from 1865 to the emergence of the leadership of Booker T. Washington, Douglass traveled extensively and spoke repeatedly about preserving a black abolitionist memory of Emancipation, the Civil War, and the achievements of Reconstruction. He found himself appalled at the way a culture of reconciliation between North and South helped erode and eventually crush the liberty and rights of African Americans. In 1871, at one of the early observances of Memorial Day at Arlington Cemetery outside Washington, D.C., Douglass declared (“Address at the Graves of the Unknown Dead”) where he stood:

"We are sometimes asked in the name of patriotism to forget the merits of this fearful struggle, and to remember with equal admiration those who struck at the nation's life, and those who struck to save it—those who fought for slavery and those who fought for liberty and justice. I am no minister of malice …, but may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I forge the difference between the parties to that … bloody conflict. … I may say that if this war is to be forgotten, I ask in the name of all things sacred what shall men remember?"

(http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/doughtml/doughome.html.) Douglass's voice was crucial in the late-nineteenthcentury debate over the legacies of the Civil War. He tried to counter the influence of the “Confederate lost cause,” which became not only a way of coping with defeat and a comforting narrative about noble sacrifice for white Southerners but also an aggressive racial ideology intended to control educational and political policy in the larger society. He also rejected much of the national, reconciliationist memory about the mutual valor of soldiers on both sides, fighting for equal glory. In a speech to a northern veterans' group in Madison Square in New York City in 1878, Douglass argued that “the war was not a fight between rapacious birds and ferocious beasts, a mere display of brute courage and endurance, but it was a war between men of thought, as well as of action, and in dead earnest for something beyond the battlefield.” With pen and voice Douglass tried to keep alive a memory that placed Emancipation at the center of the nation's understanding of the meaning of the Civil War.

Literacy and Power

Douglass's writing can hardly be separated from his oratory. Much of his autobiographical prose flows in sermonic tones and cadences. He became a first-rate political journalist in the sixteen years he edited his newspaper. He mastered the short, polemical editorial and the expository public letter. He could plead a case, write an exposé, or make moral abolitionist arguments aimed at the hearts and minds of his readers. In the 1850s he entered the political fray, supporting candidates and transforming his editorial page into a platform for political abolitionism. In his endorsement of John P. Hale, the Free-Soil Party candidate for president in 1852, Douglass announced a new political philosophy that would resonate with readers for decades to come: “Our rule of political action is this: the voter ought to see to it that his vote shall secure the highest good possible, at the same time that it does no harm.” He could be a pragmatist and an ideologue, depending on the circumstances. In reaction to the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which opened vast western territory to the possibility of the expansion of slavery, Douglass likened compromises with the “Slave Power” to “thawing a deadly viper, instead of killing it.” A radical directness characterized many of his editorials on the great crises over slavery's expansion. “The real issue to be made with the Slave Power is this,” he declared. “Slavery, like rape, robbery, piracy, and murder, has no right to exist in any part of the world—that neither north or south of 36 deg. 30 min. shall it have a moment's repose, if we can help it.” Such sentences fit well the orator's platform or the journalist's printed page.

Douglass, in a photograph that was the frontispiece for the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, New Revised Edition of 1892, published in Boston.

University of Rochester Library, Rare Books and Special Collections.

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By entering the debate over the Slave Power and party politics, Douglass found himself as a writer playing two divergent roles: the black representative and voice of the slaves and the political abolitionist concerned about national destiny and the welfare of the Union. His purpose was to capture the new national awareness about slavery and to convert it into an increased concern for black freedom. The two roles both conflicted with and served each other. If he could link white fears of a slaveholding conspiracy to black suffering, a common cause might yet be struck where only racism had reigned before. In that hope, Douglass found his own way to supporting the Republican Party in 1856 and beyond. He found it impossible to resist the appeal of a broad coalition that could discredit slavery, even if it fell short of calling for complete abolition and equal rights for blacks. On his editorial page Douglass demonstrated the skills of a realist, an opportunist, and a moralist all at once. Drawing on the pivotal crises of his time, he made himself into one of the great radical journalists of American history.

Like many journalists and memoirists, Douglass also tried his hand at fiction. In 1853 he published a novella, The Heroic Slave, in his newspaper and in Autographs for Freedom, a collection of antislavery testimonies edited by his close friend Julia Griffiths. The short work fictionalizes a real person, Madison Washington, a Virginia slave who escaped to Canada, returned to free his wife, and was recaptured in the effort. Washington was sold south to New Orleans on a slave ship, Creole, where he led a slave mutiny in 1841. In the novella, Douglass reimagines Washington as a courageous and brilliant leader, a man who is “intelligent and brave” and possesses “the head to conceive and the hand to execute.” Douglass used the story in 1853, the very time when fugitive slave rescues and resistance peaked, to illustrate the virtues of violence. Washington's successful slave revolt thwarts stereotypes of blacks as passive drudges at the same time that it serves as a poignant story of regeneration through violence, an idea more abolitionists began to embrace. In whatever genre, as a writer Douglass experimented with the many elements of his own story at the same time that he tried to imagine a new future—for himself, for African Americans, and for the nation.

Thinker

Scholars long considered Douglass largely as a biographical subject, a “representative man,” the ennobling example of the slave who became free. Only after more than a century was he treated as a true intellectual, a thinker of philosophical importance. Never a philosopher in the formal sense, the former slave nevertheless left a large body of thought worthy of interpretation for its enduring arguments and challenges. Douglass possessed what one scholar called a profound “commitment to argument,” and he was particularly adept at reasoning. Although he was born a slave, he rose to greatness not only because he could stand as a symbol but also because he dedicated himself to endless curiosity, to homegrown learning and wide reading, and, finally, to investigating why his American world was the way it was. Douglass's great subject was America's essential contradiction: slavery and freedom in an expanding Republic, espousing creeds such as natural rights and equality, yet practicing inhumane violations of those very principles. America's faith in reason and its inheritance of liberty made this former slave a great student of paradox and irony.

Douglass was a unique voice of humanism, romantic individualism, political and reform ideology, and the jeremiadic tradition. He became one of America's greatest analysts of racism and human alienation. Despite a life full of anguish and struggle, and though many people influenced his career, Douglass embraced self-reliance as much as Ralph Waldo Emerson did, albeit for different reasons. Like Walt Whitman, he endlessly probed the meaning of the self in relation to society and history. Like Abraham Lincoln and many other contemporaries, Douglass believed in a providential view of history and in the United States as a nation with a special destiny and unique obligations. In an age that mixed sacred and secular thought, he became a spiritual prophet for black aspirations in America.

By the late 1850s, and especially during the Civil War, Douglass employed the jeremiad as well as anyone. This was the tradition of rhetoric, at least as old as the Puritans in America, that levied chastisements and warnings against the fate of people who lose faith, violate their own principles, and fail to keep alive an inheritance. The black jeremiad characteristically issued warnings to white audiences about the judgment that was to come for the sin of slavery or racism. In 1859, in the midst of anxiety over the slavery crisis, Douglass bitterly attacked President James Buchanan for his handling of the Kansas question—the violence and fraudulent elections in the frontier conflict known as “Bleeding Kansas”—but, true to the jeremiadic tradition, turned his lament into a cry of hope: “Go on sir,” he wrote, “let the nation go on sir. The end is at hand. The haughty Assyrians will yet be brought low—the ire of offended justice will yet flash upon your soul, and burn up your heart strings with unquenchable fire.”

Douglass welcomed the Civil War when it came in 1861 and interpreted the process of disunion, total war, and Emancipation as a second American Revolution. He imagined himself as one of the new founders of a reinvented nation, rooted in the fact of black freedom and the promise of equality. In that philosophical vein, Douglass also made a major contribution to the broad biblical apocalypticism through which Americans, North and South, made sense of the war. In the crucible of such a bloody conflict, Douglass saw a cleansing and a regenerative power for American society. On the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, he said in an editorial, “We are all liberated by this proclamation. … It is a mighty event for the bondman, but it is a still mightier event for the nation at large.”

Douglass's personal religious outlook changed over time, moving from a Christian millennialism early in his career to a postwar religious liberalism and humanism. His millennialism was as much a conception of history as it was a belief in a genuine Second Coming of Christ, but it very much informed his activism and his concept of American nationalism. Regardless of the changes in his own religious journey, biblical imagery, metaphor, and traditions remained embedded in Douglass's rhetoric throughout his life, and he never ceased his attacks on religious hypocrisy.

During Reconstruction, Douglass's ideas aligned with the Radical Republicans' efforts to remake the South on the cornerstone of black suffrage and to guarantee that the Old South's leadership would never attain power again. However, framed by the classical ideology of liberal politics, Douglass's vision of Reconstruction lacked a thorough economic analysis. Political and moral phenomena dominated Douglass's mind and caused several unresolved contradictions in his postwar thought: he professed a strong belief in the sanctity of private property while demanding land for the powerless freedmen, he coupled laissez-faire individualism and black self-reliance with demands for federal aid to freedmen, and he implied that political liberty was both a sufficient and a necessary cause of economic independence and social equality. Although such inconsistencies might have limited his effectiveness, they were typical of the age and consistent with his own experience as a fugitive slave rising to fame.

Finally, Douglass's varied writings are significant for their searching analysis of the effects of racism. They offer a striking illustration of the concept of “double consciousness” famously described by W. E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk in 1903. Had Douglass lived to read the passage about the African American dilemma of being “an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body,” it might have struck him as an astute description of his own inner life. Douglass lived and analyzed what Du Bois would call the “double-aimed struggle” between national and racial identity. The reconciliation of such dualities was one of the central challenges of Douglass's personal and public life. In an 1853 editorial, Douglass described the black intellectual of the mid-nineteenth century as “isolated in the land of his birth—debarred by his color from congenial associations with whites … equally cast out by the ignorances of blacks.”

Like virtually all black thinkers in the nineteenth century, Douglass never fully resolved his simultaneous beliefs in special racial gifts and the Enlightenment notion of a common human nature. Sometimes he asserted black cultural uniqueness, but he never relinquished his faith in human unity. In an 1884 interview Douglass declared that “there is no division of races. God almighty made but one race. I adopt the theory that in time the variety of races will be blended into one. … You may say that Frederick Douglass considers himself a member of the one race which exists.” Douglass wanted to transcend race and all its insidious restrictions, although he knew as well as anyone that it was perhaps the defining feature of the America in which he grew old.

It was so defining that in 1893, the aging Douglass joined with the antilynching activist Ida B. Wells in publishing The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition (at Chicago), a bitter critique of racism and violence in the country. In January 1894 in Washington, D.C., Douglass delivered his last major speech, “The Lessons of the Hour,” a bitter denunciation of lynching. The seventy-six-year-old lion rose to a full roar and spoke with his full descriptive and analytical powers. “Not a breeze comes to us from the late rebellious states that is not tainted and freighted with Negro blood,” he charged. “In its thirst for blood and its rage for vengeance, the mob has blindly, boldly, and defiantly supplanted sheriffs, constables, and police.”

Douglass examined the power of the Big Lie in public understanding. Three “excuses,” he said, had been used over time to justify lynching: the fear of “insurrection,” the claim of “Negro domination” in southern politics, and when those two were “worn out … the charge of assault upon defenseless women” by black men. Southern mobs were not spontaneous responses to preserve social order, as defenders of the Ku Klux Klan and lynching had claimed. Douglass ruthlessly exposed their “design, plan, purpose, and invention.” Everything Douglass had fought and lived to attain in America's racial history seemed at risk as hundreds of blacks died each year at the hands of lynch mobs. In this stunning valedictory, however, the great orator threw lightning bolts of truth and reason at America's greatest problem. Characteristically, he even found ways to hope in the face of despair. “The picture is dark and terrible,” he admitted. But “the lie” about lynching had to be met with “essential truth.” And he called his audience to remember the better instincts of the nation's history. “Its voice,” he pleaded, was once “the trump of an archangel, summoning … tyranny to judgment. … Toiling millions heard it and clapped their hands for joy. … Its mission was the redemption of the world from the bondage of ages.” Still the dreamer, hoping that America's better angels could be marshaled against its ugliest inner hatreds, Douglass went out with a clarion call for justice.

Voice Falls Silent

Douglass suffered from heart trouble during his last years. On 20 February 1895 he died of a heart attack at Cedar Hill. He had just returned from a rally for women's suffrage. Funeral services were held in Washington at the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church, where Douglass had been a regular Sunday speaker for several years. On 26 February he was buried at Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, New York. The nation's most famed African American was dead, and the great voice went silent, but his writings, his symbol, and his legacies would endure and only grow with time in a nation that has yet to fully face the problems he so eloquently addressed.

Douglass, in an engraving by Augustus Robin, New York, after a photograph made by George K. Warren c. 1879.

University of Rochester Library, Rare Books and Special Collections.

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In the twentieth century Douglass's image appeared repeatedly in African American poetry and prose. No one invoked the abolitionist's visage more subtly or effectively than Ralph Ellison in his great novel Invisible Man. One day at the offices of the protest organization for which Invisible has become an orator, an older member of the group, named Tarp, clambers onto a chair to hang a special picture on the wall. As Tarp steps down, the following exchange occurs with Invisible:

" “Son, you know who that is?”
“Why yes,” I said, “it's Frederick Douglass.”
“Yessir, that's just who it is. You know much about him?”
“Not much. My grandfather used to tell me about him though.”
“That's enough. He was a great man. You just take a look at him once in a while.”
“Brother Tarp … thanks for the portrait of Douglass.”
“Don't thank me, son,” he said from the door. “He belongs to all of us.”
"

(pp. 328–329) Invisible's grandfather (and Ellison's) had been a slave, and the narrator sometimes hears his grandfather's voice calling him to somehow be “more human.” Ellison ends the scene with Invisible's looking up at the Douglass portrait, “feeling a sudden piety, remembering and refusing to hear the echoes of my grandfather's voice.” Such is also the enduring condition of the nation's memory of Douglass. His voice is now more available than ever, but do we listen or refuse to hear the man in the picture on the wall?

See also Abolitionism; African Americans and the West; African Methodist Episcopal Church; American Anti-Slavery Society; Antislavery Movement; Antislavery Press; Auld Family; Bailey Family; Bailey, Harriet; Baltimore, Maryland, Slavery in; Black Abolitionists; Black Militias; Black Politics; Black Press; Brown, John; Brown, William Wells; Buchanan, James; Cambria Incident; Canada; Caulker's Trade; Civil Rights; Civil War; Civil War, Participation and Recruitment of Black Troops in; Colonization; Columbian Orator, The; Compromise of 1850; Constitution, U.S.; Covey, Edward; Crime and Punishment; Crofts, Julia Griffiths; Discrimination; Disunionism; Douglass' Monthly; Douglass, Anna Murray; Douglass, Charles Remond; Douglass, Frederick, Jr.; Douglass, Lewis Henry; Dred Scott Case; Easton, Maryland; Education; Election of 1860; Emancipation; Emancipation Proclamation; Emerson, Ralph Waldo; Emigration to Africa; Entrepreneurs; Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry Regiment; Frederick Douglass' Paper; Free African Americans before the Civil War (North); Free-Soil Party; Freedman's Savings and Trust Company; Freedmen; Fugitive Slave Law of 1850; Garfield, James A.; Garnet, Henry Highland; Garrison, William Lloyd; Garrisonian Abolitionists; Green, Shields; Haiti; Harpers Ferry Raid; Harrison, Benjamin; Hayes, Rutherford B.; Heroic Slave, The; Johnson, Andrew; Kansas-Nebraska Act; Liberty Party; Life and Times of Frederick Douglass; Lincoln, Abraham; Literature; Lloyd, Edward, V; Lynching and Mob Violence; Lynn, Massachusetts; Marriage, Mixed; Môle Saint-Nicolas (Haiti) Annexation; Moral Suasion; My Bondage and My Freedom; Nantucket; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; New National Era; New York City; Nonresistance; North Star; Oratory and Verbal Arts; Political Participation; Race, Theories of; Racism; Radical Abolitionist Party; Reconstruction; Reform; Republican Party; Resistance; Riots and Rebellions; Rochester Ladies Anti-Slavery Society; Rochester, New York; Saint Michaels, Maryland; Slave Rebellions and Insurrections; Slave Narratives; Slave Resistance; Slavery; Slavery and the U.S. Constitution; Smith, Gerrit; Stowe, Harriet Beecher; Suffrage, Women's; Truth, Sojourner; Tubman, Harriet; Uncle Tom's Cabin; Underground Railroad; Union Army, African Americans in; Violence against African Americans; Voting Rights; Washington, Booker T.; Washington, D.C.; Wells-Barnett, Ida; and World's Columbian Exposition.

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