The Life of Frederick Douglass

by Anne Schraff

  When Lincoln was elected in November, Douglass was glad, but he grew impatient when the election was not followed by a sharp rise in antislavery sentiment.

  On December 3, 1860, Douglass was attending a meeting in Boston’s Tremont Temple when a group of pro-slavery white men entered the building. As Douglass rose to make his speech, the white men barred his way to the podium. Douglass charged toward them, battering his way through their ranks to begin his speech. Douglass thundered against the “outrageous” attack on free speech.10 His enemies yelled loudly to drown him out and he responded by shouting that some white men of the North would “murder liberty—kill freedom.”11 A general riot ensued. Chairs were hurled onto the stage and Douglass was finally grabbed by the hair and thrown out of the temple by police.

  By the end of 1860, events were moving swiftly, however. Unwilling to accept the fact of Lincoln’s election, South Carolina seceded from the Union on December 20. On February 1, 1861, five other Southern states—Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and Louisiana—seceded. On February 4, 1861, a convention of the seceded states formed a new government called the Confederate States of America. Eventually Texas, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas joined as well.

  President Buchanan made efforts to persuade the southern states to end the secession, but he took no forceful action. He would be leaving office shortly and the terrible problem would fall to the incoming president, Abraham Lincoln.

  When Lincoln took office in March, his inaugural address disappointed Douglass. Lincoln’s first priority was to end the secession and restore the Union. He said he would uphold the Fugitive Slave Act and would not interfere with slavery in states where it existed.

  But, again, events overtook the reluctance of men to deal with them. On April 12, 1861, Confederate troops attacked Fort Sumter, a federal installation in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. The fort surrendered in one day. Lincoln called for troops to put down the rebellion, and North and South prepared for war. The North was fighting to preserve the Union, and the South was fighting for the right to secede from the Union and remain a nation where slavery was permitted. But to Douglass and the other abolitionists, the Civil War was about just one thing—the crusade to end slavery. At once Douglass began his campaign to persuade Lincoln to make the war a moral war against slavery.

  Douglass had two major goals as the Civil War began. First he wanted the emancipation of all slaves. Second, he wanted all black men to have the right to enlist in the Union Army. When General John C. Fremont emancipated all the slaves of Confederate sympathizers in Missouri, Lincoln voided the action. When General David Hunter freed blacks in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, Lincoln did the same. Lincoln was fearful of moving too fast and ruining all chances of ending the secession through compromise. He also feared alienating other states with southern sympathies. But on April 16, 1862, Lincoln outlawed slavery in the District of Columbia.

  As Douglass worked for his cause, troubles at home continued. Daughter Rosetta lamented the difficulty in trying to please both her parents. Anna Douglass was a strict God-fearing woman who insisted that the children read a Bible verse at the table each day.12 Frederick Douglass was more worldly. He did not share his wife’s devotion to organized religion. Worse yet, Anna Douglass was still illiterate in spite of Rosetta’s efforts to teach her to read. The Douglass children became “patronizing” to their mother because of her lack of education, Rosetta wrote.13 Rosetta and her mother often argued, so at twenty-three Rosetta moved to Philadelphia to teach school, hoping to be independent. Even there Rosetta was unhappy because she could not do what her famous father found so easy to do: move comfortably between the white, wealthy world, and the world of most black people. In 1863, Rosetta Douglass married Nathan Sprague and the couple eventually had five daughters.

  Now, with the Civil War raging, Lewis Douglass was twenty-two, Frederick Jr. was twenty, and Charles was eighteen. They were all the perfect ages to be soldiers in this great cause. When, in September 1862, President Lincoln promised to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, Douglass increased his demands for the inclusion of black soldiers in the Union Army. Governor John A. Andrew of Massachusetts called for black volunteers for the newly formed Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Volunteers. Douglass encouraged more than a hundred black men to volunteer, including his son Charles. Lewis Douglass signed up next. Frederick Jr. did not enlist.

  Lewis Douglass became the first sergeant major and Charles was a private in Company F. On May 18, 1863, the regiment was presented with its colors, and a proud Frederick Douglass watched his two sons in formation. On May 28, the Fifty-Fourth was cheered as it marched through Boston, new soldiers stepping proudly behind drummer boys. They were greeted by Governor Andrew before they boarded transport ships for Beaufort, South Carolina. Frederick Douglass watched the ship bearing his eldest son to war until it disappeared from view.

  Sergeant Major Lewis Douglass was in the first battle, an attack on Fort Wagner on July 18, 1863. “Men fell all around me,” he later wrote. “A shell would explode and clear a space of twenty feet.” He added, “How I got out of that fight alive I cannot tell.”14 He wrote to his girlfriend, “Remember if I die I die in a good cause.”15

  At Fort Wagner, more than fifteen hundred Union men fell. An observer described “dead men strewn in piles and windows, their bodies horribly mangled . . . detached arms and legs and heads were splattered all about.”16

  For Frederick Douglass, the presence of black troops in the war was bittersweet. He was proud of their service but angry that they were paid less than white soldiers. The black soldiers showed great bravery at Millikens Bend and Fort Wagner, but they were treated differently. Worse, the Confederate Congress passed a law that any black soldier who was captured would be treated not as a prisoner of war but as an insurrectionary slave whose punishment would be death. On July 30, 1863, President Lincoln responded by warning that for every Union soldier of any race killed in violation of the laws of war, a rebel soldier would be executed.

  Frederick Douglass was now very eager to meet President Lincoln face-to-face, and this happened in the summer of 1863. When Douglass went to the White House he was aware of what a breakthrough this was. Douglass was immediately impressed by the president. “There was no vain pomp and ceremony about him,” Douglass noted.17 “I at once felt myself in the presence of an honest man—one whom I could love, honor and trust without reserve or doubt.”18 “I was impressed with his entire freedom from popular prejudice against the colored race,” Douglass wrote.19

  Douglass left the White House after the meeting convinced of the good will of President Lincoln. But when Douglass asked Secretary of War Edwin Stanton for a military commission for himself, none was forthcoming. Douglass had hoped to become the first black officer in the Union Army, serving mainly in recruitment. The army was apparently not yet ready for a black officer, even one as distinguished as Frederick Douglass.

  Chapter 8

  THE STRUGGLE FOR EQUALITY

  Frederick Douglass’s son Charles did not see military action in the Civil War because he had lung trouble. When he was very ill, Douglass appealed to President Lincoln for his discharge. An order came at once. “Let this boy be discharged. A. Lincoln.”1 Douglass was grateful to be relieved of this worry, and he began working for postwar equality for blacks. He argued that there must be “but one great law of liberty, equality and fraternity for all Americans without respect to color.”2

  In May 1864, the Democrats chose the popular General George McClellan to run against Lincoln on a platform urging compromise with the Confederate States to end the war. Frederick Douglass campaigned vigorously for Lincoln’s reelection and once again met with the president to discuss the future of black Americans after the war. Lincoln did not immediately embrace Douglass’s plan for enfranchisement—giving the right to vote to all black males—but he was moving in what Douglass considered the right direction.

  The long and costly wa
r was speeding to a conclusion. General William T. Sherman marched through the South and entered Atlanta. This Union victory helped sweep Lincoln to his second-term victory. Near the end of 1864, the Confederacy was almost crushed.

  Douglass was invited to the second inauguration of President Lincoln. When lower government bureaucrats blocked his entry to an evening reception at the White House, Lincoln quickly stepped in and got Douglass into the event. On April 9, 1865, the Civil War ended with the surrender of Confederate general Robert E. Lee to Union general Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House. When, on April 14, President Lincoln was assassinated, Douglass was in Rochester. He joined other mourners in a service at city hall, saying of the fallen president, “Dying as he did die, by the red hand of violence, taken off without warning, not because of personal hate—for no man who knew Abraham Lincoln could hate him—but because of his fidelity to union and liberty, he is doubly dear to us, and his memory will be precious forever.”3

  With the end of slavery, Frederick Douglass saw his life’s dream fulfilled. He was forty-seven years old, strong and still on fire with the cause of black equality. He was eager to help the newly freed slaves adjust to life on their own. Douglass feared the president who succeeded Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, did not share Lincoln’s ideals. At Lincoln’s inauguration, Douglass had formed a negative opinion of Johnson. When Lincoln pointed Douglass out to Johnson, Douglass believed he saw aversion in Johnson’s face. “He is certainly no friend of our race,” Douglass believed.4 When Douglass met with President Johnson to urge him to allow black males to vote, Johnson insisted he had done enough for black people and he wanted to avoid throwing the races together and setting off a race war.5

  Throughout the South, Andrew Johnson reestablished white governments committed to white supremacy. White landowners reasserted their control over the black population. The Freedmen’s Bureau, established in 1865, helped the former slaves with food, clothing, and fuel and allowed them to farm abandoned land. But the bureau was floundering under the mass of freed slaves who were crowded into refugee camps. Death from disease took a terrible toll in the camps. Some weeks, a third of the former slaves staying in the camps died.6

  As Douglass was fighting to help his people, his children were establishing themselves in the postwar world. Rosetta Sprague’s husband was back from his army service, and the first Douglass grandchild, Annie, was born to the Spragues. Lewis Douglass tried and failed to get a job with the Freedmen’s Bureau and eventually found work as a teacher. Charles Douglass tended the family gardens at Rochester. In 1866, Frederick Douglass Jr. and his brother Lewis headed to Denver, Colorado, to seek their fortune in the Red, White and Blue Mining Company. Charles Douglass did finally get a job with the Freedmen’s Bureau. Frederick Douglass was offered the job of head of the bureau, but he rejected it because he did not respect President Johnson and did not want to work under him.

  In the summer of 1866, the Radical Republican–led Congress, men very sympathetic to freed black slaves, passed two bills favored by Douglass. The Freedmen’s Bureau was expanded to provide more assistance to former slaves, and the civil rights bill gave full citizenship to blacks so they would enjoy the rights of other Americans. President Johnson vetoed both bills, but they were passed over his veto. In January 1866, the Thirteenth Amendment declared that neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist in the United States.

  Increasingly dominated by Radical Republicans, Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment in June 1866 to ensure that rights given black Americans in the Civil Rights Act would be protected by the Constitution. In 1868, the Republicans tried to remove President Johnson by impeachment, but he narrowly avoided removal from office. Frederick Douglass was looking toward the election of 1868 to bring a more sympathetic president into office. He campaigned for General Ulysses Grant, and soon after Grant’s election, the Fifteenth Amendment, granting all men, regardless of color, the right to vote, was passed. This caused a rift between Douglass and some of his friends who fought for the right of women to vote. Reformer and antislavery crusader Susan B. Anthony complained that the Fifteenth Amendment placed colored men in the position of tyrants over colored women. When Douglass made a speech saying, “black men first and white women afterwards,” there was little applause from Anthony and her fellow campaigners for woman suffrage.7

  In the South, hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan were terrorizing blacks into submission, and throughout the North, black people faced discrimination. Lewis Douglass had searched in vain for work after he returned from the war, and this enraged his father. Frederick Douglass said of his son, “He had borne himself like a man on the perilous edge of battle. . . . Day after day, week after week, and month after month he sought work, found none, and came home sad and dejected. I had felt the iron of Negro hate before, but the case of this young man gave it a deeper entrance into my soul than ever before.”8

  In September 1870, Frederick Douglass became editor and part owner of the New National Era, a newspaper devoted to the cause of black people not as a separate class but as part of all America. Two years later, while Douglass was in Washington, the family home in Rochester burned down, taking many of Douglass’s invaluable writings. Nothing was left but ashes. The fire was thought to have been purposely set, but the crime was never solved. What most saddened Douglass was seeing the charred skeletons of trees he had lovingly planted twenty years earlier.9

  Douglass moved his family to a house in Washington, D.C., and in 1872 campaigned for Grant’s reelection. But, in spite of his effort on Grant’s behalf, he received no offers of a government job from the Grant administration. Douglass returned to lecturing to earn money. The Douglasses lived in a charming home a few blocks from the Capitol. There were small gardens, but nothing like the large garden Anna Douglass had so loved at the Rochester home.

  In March 1874, Frederick Douglass was chosen to be president of Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company. It was a national savings bank chartered by the United States. The purpose of the bank was to encourage savings by blacks so they could eventually buy homes and farms. A passbook showing a bank balance was a source of pride to poor former slaves who had never had anything of their own.

  Unfortunately, Frederick Douglass did not know the bank was failing when he took the job as president.10 He was not aware of the generous loans the bank had made that would never be repaid. A financial crisis was gripping the entire United States and many banks were failing. Douglass tried desperately to save the bank, even using his own money to shore it up, and then pleading in vain to the Senate Finance Committee for help.11 The United States could have bailed out the bank just as it was bankrolling the railroad system at the time, but this was not done. Tragically, many poor black depositors lost the little they had. It was embarrassing and painful to Douglass that he had played a role in an institution that harmed his people.

  Another blow struck Douglass in 1874. The New National Era could not attract enough subscribers and it closed down in October. Personal and financial problems dogged Douglass. Rosetta and Nathan Sprague were being hounded by creditors and were forced to watch their household possessions being carried off. The other Douglass children were struggling too and were always asking their father for help. Douglass did the best he could, but he was not wealthy.

  Douglass campaigned for Rutherford Hayes in the 1876 election. After Hayes was elected, he appointed Douglass marshal of the District of Columbia. It was a largely ceremonial job, but it did give Douglass a large staff of employees to help oversee the criminal justice system in Washington, D.C. He could help black people seeking civil service jobs, and he was able to live more comfortably now that he had a dependable salary. The negative side of all this was that many of Douglass’s black friends criticized him for working for President Hayes, who had stopped significant federal action in the South to help blacks. The advances made by the Radical Republicans in the Grant years did not continue under Hayes. There was a return to the old pattern of whites
controlling society, and many of the black officeholders elected in the South after the Civil War were now being replaced by white men. New laws, known as Jim Crow laws, were being enacted all over the South, denying blacks equality in jobs, housing, and public accommodations.

  There were even charges that Frederick Douglass himself was not allowed to stand beside the president at formal receptions, as the marshal usually did, because of his color. Douglass denied that he was slighted, saying he never had reason to believe President Hayes or his amiable wife looked down on him. In fact, Douglass was a frequent sight at White House social events, appearing very much at home in White House parlors.12

  In 1877, Frederick Douglass learned that his former master, Thomas Auld, was now feeble and sick. Douglass returned to St. Michaels, Maryland, for an emotional visit with Auld. When Douglass was ushered into Auld’s bedroom, the former master greeted the former slave as “Marshal Douglass,” and Douglass addressed Auld as he always had, as “Captain Auld.” Douglass did not want the stiff politeness to continue, so he told Auld “not Marshal, but Frederick to you as formerly.”13 The two men shook hands, and Auld, trembling and weakened by paralysis, wept. He was deeply moved by the occasion and by Douglass’s warmth. Douglass noticed how Auld shook and how ill he was. Later Douglass recalled feeling “choked” and “speechless.”14 Still, Auld’s mind was very clear and the two men spoke for a long time about the old days.