Frederick Douglass-Bio.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Orator and Abolitionist

Who could know that a slave baby boy, born at Holme Hill Farm in Talbot County on the eastern shore of Maryland in February 1818, to Harriet Bailey, a slave, and a white father (possibly Aaron Anthony, the white overseer), would grow up to be one of the Nineteenth Century’s most eloquent orators and one of its most famous abolitionists?

Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, sent to his master’s brother in Baltimore at age eight to be a companion for two-year-old Tommy Auld, was taught to read by Tommy’s mother—until her husband forbade it. After all, black people who learned to read “got ideas,” and it “ruined” them for slavery.

Exactly.

Frederick had a passion for learning and taught himself—and then taught others. After a conversion experience at age 13, Frederick soaked up Christian teaching from an elderly black mentor, Charles Lawson, and joined the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Baltimore. Sent back to his owner, Thomas Auld, at age fifteen, he conducted a secret Sunday school for other slaves, using the Holy Bible to teach them to read—until the Sunday school for blacks was busted by Thomas Auld (a Sunday school teacher himself) and several other church men.

For his impertinent spirit, Frederick was sent to work for a year for Edward Covey, a “Negro breaker.” No matter how hard Frederick tried, he got whipped for anything and everything that went wrong. Finally he fought back—not to injure Covey, but to keep from being injured. Standing up for himself made him “feel like a man” and kindled a deep desire for liberty.

Frederick finally managed to escape from slavery September 3, 1838, at age twenty. His sweetheart, a free black woman named Anna Murray, joined him shortly and they were married on September 15 in New York, aided by the New York Vigilance Committee. At this time, Frederick changed his last name to Douglass (after a Scottish Lord in Walter Scott’s epic poem, The Lady of the Lake) to disguise his identity. The newlyweds settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts, which had an active cadre of abolitionists.

Frederick was only twenty-one when he made his first public speech, denouncing proposals to colonize freed slaves in Africa and demanding that they be treated as free and equal U.S. citizens. Abolitionists sat up and took notice. In August 1841, he was invited to speak at the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Convention, where he spoke eloquently about his life as a slave. Within a few years he was considered a major spokesperson for the abolition movement—speaking, writing for abolitionists newspapers (and eventually starting his own, first the North Star, which later became Frederick Douglass’s Paper), and writing the first of three autobiographies. His speaking tours took him overseas to England where he was received with great interest and respect.

In 1848, Frederick and Anna Douglass settled in Rochester, New York, to raise their growing family of two girls and three boys. Anna, who was illiterate in spite of Frederick’s attempts to teach her to read, took in sewing to supplement Frederick’s speaking fees. The Rochester home sheltered slaves escaping to Canada, as well as a gathering place for local children who enjoyed an evening being entertained by Frederick singing and playing his violin.

The abolitionist movement did not speak with one voice, and eventually Douglass split with William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips over Garrison’s “disunion doctrine” and whether the Constitution was pro-slavery. (Douglass took the position that the Constitution, properly interpreted, was not pro-slavery, and the United States should remain united and all its citizens free—nothing less.) Abolitionist John Brown tried to talk Douglass into supporting his plans to arm slaves and spark an armed rebellion. Douglass admired Brown’s goals and his passion, but refused to support the ill-advised raid on Harper’s Ferry on October 16, 1859—but because of his friendship with Brown, an order for Douglass’s arrest went out. Douglass slipped out of the country on an already scheduled speaking tour in Europe—during which his ten-year-old daughter, Annie, died.

In 1861, Frederick Douglas supported the newly formed Republican Party and its candidate, Abraham Lincoln, as the nation’s best hope to end slavery totally. He was at times impatient with and critical of Lincoln’s “slow steps” toward total abolition and full equality, but in this plain man from Illinois—who said: “This Union could not long endure half slave and half free; that they must be all one or the other, and that the public mind could find no resting place but in the belief in the ultimate extinction of slavery”—Douglass found “the proper standard bearer . . . against the slave power.”

Lincoln was elected the sixteenth president of the United States in November 1860; on December 20, South Carolina made good on its threat to secede from the Union if he was elected. At first the federal government made all sorts of concessions to appease the South (Secretary of State William Seward said, “Terminate however it might, the status of no class of people would be changed by the rebellion”—that is, slaves would still be slaves no matter who won the war.) But the South would not be appeased.

Lincoln was inaugurated on March 4, 1861. Confederate artillery fired on Fort Sumter from Charleston, South Carolina, on April 12. The Civil War had begun.

Douglass welcomed the outbreak of the war. He had no hope that Southern slave owners would by reason and moral persuasion voluntarily give up the slave system. For two years he used his writing and oratory skills to plead for the right of blacks to fight and prove their loyalty to the Union and their worth as U.S. citizens. “The iron gate of our prison stands half open,” Douglass said. “One gallant rush . . . will fling it wide.”

The overwhelming losses suffered by both sides at Bull Run, Antietam, and Gettysburg made it clear: black troops were needed in this war. President Lincoln gave Massachusetts Governor John Andrews the go-ahead to raise two regiments of free blacks in the northern states (the only other black regiments to date had been made up of freed slaves in southern states who mostly ended up on garrison duty, to free white soldiers to fight). Andrews appointed abolitionist George Stearns of Boston to recruit; Stearns turned to Frederick Douglass. “Will you help?”

Two of Douglass’s sons—Lewis, age twenty-two, and Charles, age eighteen—were among the first recruits from New York to volunteer for the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Infantry, commanded by Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, son of Francis Shaw, a deeply dedicated Boston abolitionist. The Fifty-Fourth proved themselves worthy soldiers on James Island and at Fort Wagner, but Douglass met personally with President Lincoln on August 10, 1863, to discuss discriminatory practices such as unequal pay, unequal treatment of black prisoners of war, and difficulty in becoming officers. Both men developed a deep respect for each other, and after Lincoln’s assassination, Mary Todd Lincoln sent Douglass the president’s walking stick as a gift.

All of Frederick Douglass’s sons returned home alive from the war. Douglass was elected president of the National Convention of Colored People in 1869; challenged President Andrew Johnson who waffled on equal rights for freed slaves; used his speaking and writing to support the Fifteenth Amendment giving black men the right to vote; was appointed U.S. Marshal of Washington, D.C. by President Rutherford Hayes; and later was named General Consul to Haiti by President Benjamin Harrison—to name just a few of his political efforts. For several years after the war, blacks made great strides in the area of civil rights and citizenship.

In 1882, Douglass suffered from grief and depression when Anna, his wife of forty-four years, died and was buried back in Rochester, New York. Two years later, however, he married Helen Pitts, a well-educated women’s rights activist. The interracial marriage was criticized by some, but Frederick and Helen Douglass were invited to dine at the White House by President Grover Cleveland. The Douglasses shared many mutual concerns and enjoyed eleven years of companionship before Frederick died of heart failure in 1892.

In 1887, three hundred members of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts (including Lewis Douglass, who had returned to the South as a teacher after the war) held a reunion in Boston against a background of increasing racial violence after federal troops had been withdrawn from the South. They called on the U.S. Government to use “every proper means and influence it may possess to see to it that the colored defenders of its life in its day of peril, and their kindred or race, have the full and equal protection of the laws.”

By 1900, however, black voters had been successfully eliminated from the rolls of every Southern state by discriminatory voting regulations—an injustice that remained until the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.