The pace of a lecture a day continued. At Dunn's Hall in Galesburg, Douglass found a larger receptive audience; they often interrupted him with applause, especially for his satirical impressions of self-deluded and self-serving slaveholders. Coming off this success, Douglass had a smaller crowd in Peoria, then a larger one, and finally an invitation to come back a week later for two more special lectures. Tickets were quickly made available at local bookstores, selling for fifteen cents for one and twenty-five cents for a pair. The local newspaper reported that even those who attended for the purpose of heckling came away "astonished and interested." Douglass, simply by standing before them, was nothing less than "a living example of what the negro can attain to." They found his very presence an effective antislavery argument. Douglass's final engagement was one of the largest audiences ever fit into Rouse's Hall.29
Perhaps the most moving episode of the tour came after Douglass's engagement in Belvidere. An older white man approached him, warmly touching his hand. Douglass was puzzled at first glance, but then remembered that this man had helped him when he had finally reached New Bedford, Massachusetts, as a fugitive from slavery. Mr. Cobb had not only employed Douglass sweeping chimneys, but had protected him from a white workman from Baltimore who was about to strike him with a shovel. Much had changed in twenty years. The fugitive chimney sweep was now a nationally known figure, speaking to thousands.30
By 1859, so too had the life of Abraham Lincoln changed, with his mounting presidential ambitions propelling him to travel widely, speaking to Republican groups from Kansas to Wisconsin to Ohio and all the New England states. Many wanted to hear the man who had battled the Little Giant so effectively. If his rival Stephen Douglas was indeed going to be the presidential nominee for the Democrats, the new and fledgling Republican party wanted to hear the powerful arguments that had so daunted him. Slowly, Lincoln's constant stream of speaking appearances made the lawyer admit of the approaching 1860 election, "The taste is in my mouth a little."31
In editing the senatorial debates for publication, Lincoln painstakingly pasted down the long yellowing newspaper columns he had so carefully collected and clipped, including those repeating the senator's wholesale fabrication of Lincoln's supposed tie to "Fred Douglass." Still, Lincoln made no further recorded reference then or later during the presidential campaign to having been falsely associated with the radical Douglass.
Indeed, it was precisely because Lincoln was so far from being a Black Republican that this unlikely Illinois politician slowly rose to national prominence, to gain widespread acceptance among the broad middle ground of his party. Still, to be an acceptable and passably agreeable compromise candidate was not likely to be enough to supplant the leading Republican, New York's wily, urbane Senator William Henry Seward.
CHAPTER 2
A Self Made Man
For Douglass, escaping from slavery was a necessity rather than a choice. Slave masters stole more than a lifetime of one's labor, they stole the core of one's self. To resist was a revolutionary act, a political statement.
Yet the experience of freedom was more than escape from bondage. The talk Frederick Douglass delivered most frequently was not one on the abolitionist cause, but rather one about "Self-Made Men." In hundreds of speeches and articles, and most especially in his three published autobiographies, he asserted that his rise from slavery was more than merely living out the American economic dream; it was a radical inner transformation, a revolutionary redefinition of what being an American actually meant. Douglass was intent on being an equal citizen in a society that, in the 1857 Dred Scott decision of the United States Supreme Court, declared this to be impossible.
During his lifetime, Douglass never knew the month or year of his birth. He shared this melancholy fact of slave life in his first autobiography: "By far the larger part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs, and it is the wish of most masters within my knowledge to keep their slaves thus ignorant."1Records show he was born in February of 1818 in Talbot County, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. His age was just one piece of knowledge that he longed for all his life. He also did not know who his father was. In his first autobiography, he wrote that his father was a white man, and he hinted that it was Capt. Aaron Anthony, his first owner. Anthony was remembered as a drunkard, tortured by the moral disparity between tender moments when he would call Douglass his "little Indian boy" and jealous rages when he would mercilessly whip slave women. By Douglass's last autobiography, Life and Times, he concluded his paternal search with a simple sentence, "Of my father I know nothing."2
Douglass remembered his mother, Harriet Bailey, though he only saw her a precious few times and always at night. Anthony separated mother and child by sending her to another family twelve miles away, yet despite the exertion of being a field hand, on some nights she took the long walk to let her son fall asleep on her shoulder. He remembered her as saying little and carrying a burdened and sad presence. By the time he awakened, she was always gone. Douglass was cared for some years by his maternal grandparents. When he turned seven, he learned his mother was dead. His reaction to her death was muted, for he hardly knew this woman who was a mother and a near stranger both. It was only in the years to come that he felt a lingering sadness and longing for her.
This pain and a need to search for something firm to stand on marked his lifelong relationship with the land and seascape of eastern Maryland, as well as the people who had claimed him as property. He once told Maryland lawyer James Hall what it felt like to be "separated from all the dear ones of my youth as if by the shadow of death," and he implored Hall to discover anything he could as to the circumstances of his early life. Few freed slaves ever had the money or the favorable circumstances to reach back into their past, but Douglass did, and he added that these "tidings from the place, the people, the friends, and the objects associated with my youthful days have for me an interest which you can better imagine than I can express."3In 1854 he wrote that the search for some kind of definite past was a powerful reason to hate slavery's cruelty: "The thought of only being a creature of the present and the past, troubled me, and I longed to have a future—a future with hope in it.4
Douglass's first owner lived on an Eastern Shore plantation owned by the distinguished Lloyd family. Young Frederick was selected to be the playmate of Lloyd's son, Daniel. Being around an educated and privileged boy broadened Douglass's earliest horizons. After Anthony died in 1826, his estate, including his slaves, was divided among his three children. Before the estate could be settled, his daughter, Lucretia Anthony Auld, died and her widower husband, Thomas Auld, became Douglass's second owner. A few years before Anthony's death, the Aulds had arranged for Douglass to spend his crucial early adolescent years with Thomas's brother and sister-in-law, Hugh and Sophia Auld, in Baltimore. There he rubbed shoulders with free blacks and sensed a wider world beyond servitude. Douglass believed that just the opportunity to leave behind plantation life, even for a few years, had ensured his spirit was not broken at a young age. During his time in Baltimore, his new master's wife, Sophia Auld, showed him kindness that revealed to him that white people were varied and capable of something beyond cruelty.
The motherless Douglass felt tenderness toward the woman who began to teach him to read. When Sophia Auld offered to teach him the ABCs, this brief kindness was harshly interrupted by her husband, Hugh, who claimed "Learning . . . would forever unfit him to be a slave." These words were to the young boy "a new and special revelation," enlightening him in a moment that the true path to freedom lay in the power of expression. "What he dreaded, I most desired," Douglass later wrote.5In his brief years near the docks of Baltimore, he befriended local white boys and bribed them to help him learn to read.
Being in Baltimore also allowed Douglass to purchase a book, the most important fifty cents he ever spent. Caleb Bingham, a Massachusetts educator with abolitionist sympathies, had edited and collected in 1797 a wide variety of great and patrioti
c oratory in a profoundly influential book called The Columbian Orator. The boy not only read and absorbed its messages of personal liberty, but used The Columbian Orator to train himself as a public speaker, reading its speeches aloud and practicing them "with Rules calculated to Improve Youth and Others in the Ornamental and Useful Art of Eloquence." 6 Douglass's self-understanding radically shifted when he read a passage titled "Dialogue Between a Master and Slave," in which the slave is able to so masterfully refute his owner's argument for bondage that he is in the end emancipated. At the age of twelve, Douglass became obsessed with the passage. Never had he heard such impressive and subversive abolitionist ideas articulated. He tried to forget the power of what he had read, but everywhere he turned, he was reminded of the condition in which he was trapped, one he now understood to be unnatural. The Columbian Orator showed eloquence and oratory as the most crucial weapon against injustice.
He felt from a very young age that he was somehow special, marked for some great purpose. This inner belief of greatness did not minimize the obstacles and crushing oppression he was forced to overcome, but his charismatic personality combined with certain special circumstances allowed this belief to survive savage beatings, periods of depression, and repeated failures to escape to freedom. His glowering handsome features and forceful physical presence, even in the condition of slavery, made him an impressive figure. Yet, something else distinguished him: that hunger to read and write which he accomplished through his own wiles and through the focused application of his strong intelligence. Above all, he learned to speak eloquently before crowds, where his special talent for weaving a compelling story in a powerful conversational style reinforced this inner conviction of a special destiny. While Douglass was a slave in Baltimore, a black preacher named Charles Lawson told him that he saw the young man going on to do a mighty work for the Lord. Despite all that was moving against him, Douglass felt God had chosen him for a great mission.
At age fifteen, however, he was sent back to the Eastern Shore to the town of St. Michaels, to return to intensive field labor. He later wrote that the years back in farm work almost destroyed his sense of self, much less his hope of freedom. To be an obedient slave, one must live without thought. After the Baltimore years and his tantalizing taste of the power of reading, Douglass was a hard man to render numb. In Douglass's Narrative, he described the tough contest between keeping alive an inner sense of self and a kind of blankness, a numbed "beast-like stupor" of ceaseless labor.7As he was the only slave in the region who could read, his owners distrusted him and strove to break him. This long vicious battle over his will and sense of self only served in the end to reinforce his self-image as separate, special, and eager for release.
The land around St. Michaels is a narrow geographic area where the Chesapeake Bay is never very far from sight, with its rich salt smell and blue vistas. Working in these fields offered Douglass continual views of the sea, just as the harbor of Baltimore had done. He wrote movingly of standing before the Chesapeake waters, watching the freedom of vessels moving with the wind, spending hours staring at them "with saddened heart and tearful eye." He saw mighty ships sail off to places that he could not go.8Such views also were a constant reminder that it was possible to somehow, someday, leave this place, to escape the confines of his master's fields and this narrow near-life.
During this time, young Frederick Bailey, as he was named then, encountered Edward Covey. Slave owners sent insubordinate slaves to Covey so that he could destroy any resolve or resistance left in their constitution. For months, the fifteen-year-old endured the slave breaker's presence, leading to a whipping a week upon his already-scarred back, and the young man was close to cracking.
Finally, Covey thrashed a hickory slat against Frederick's head, causing a wound so painful that Frederick ran to his master to beg for help, to no avail. An older slave named Sandy encountered Frederick during his dejected walk back to Covey and did his best to treat his wound. As Frederick climbed down the ladder in the barn, Covey rushed from behind to bind the boy's strong legs with a rope. As he resisted, Covey grabbed on hard, sending them both falling to the barn floor. At this moment, something odd happened inside of the young man. A sudden, desperate spirit of resistance filled him and without regards to the consequences, he resolved never to be beaten again, even if it meant his death. He rose to his feet and grabbed the shocked white man by his throat. This was the last thing the slave breaker expected. Covey broke free and yelled, "Are you going to resist, you scoundrel?" The overseer and his prey battled in the searing August sun for two long hours to a standstill. Valuing his infamous reputation, Covey told no one about the fight and never whipped Frederick again.9
After a failed attempt to escape in 1836, the eighteen-year-old Frederick Bailey found himself waiting to learn his fate in a local jail cell. He faced the worst jeopardy yet as he was liable to be severely punished and resold to slave traders who would send him deeper into the South, where eventual escape might be all but impossible. At the last moment, Thomas Auld decided instead to send Frederick back to Baltimore.
Though life back in Baltimore allowed considerably more comfort and safety, and even with discussions with Auld on how he might someday be able to buy his freedom, Frederick continued to chafe under his straitened life. Then he met Anna Murray, a young woman who would be a catalyst for realizing his dream of freedom. Five years older than Douglass, she was a native of Maryland. Her parents had been slaves, but she was born unbound. Feeling the need to be self-sufficient, she had moved to Baltimore at seventeen to work for a white family.
While there was a powerful social division in antebellum black Baltimore between being free and enslaved, the enterprising Douglass won her trust and heart. The ambitious young man's dream of freedom enthralled her, and she contributed her hard-earned savings to his plan. With a train ticket, a disguise as a sailor, seaman's papers that would not bear too much close examination, and the great good fortune of not being betrayed along the way, Douglass took four boats and three trains to arrive in bustling New York with a sensation he had never before felt: freedom.
After Anna joined him in New York, they were married and eventually settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts. As a fugitive, though, he was not safe. This was the new reality of Douglass's life, even in the free states of the North. Douglass did hard, low-paying menial work as a ship's caulker—but at least he now earned for himself, struggling for enough money to support a new and quickly growing family. Moreover, as he eked out a strenuous new life, the process of self-creation continued, especially in one crucial way. In talking with a man who was harboring him in his first weeks of freedom, it was suggested that he take the name of a romantic Scottish hero named Douglas, from Walter Scott's novel The Lady of the Lake. There was no more Frederick Bailey. He freely chose a new name from a fictional protagonist who bravely fought to reclaim his rightful inheritance.
Though he believed his future lay in physically demanding jobs, Douglass still hankered after learning, especially in regard to the alluring world of abolitionism. He attended an antislavery conference on Nantucket in August 1841. William Coffin, one of the white organizers, recognized him in the audience from a church where Douglass sometimes spoke and asked him to share his story with the crowd. His listeners found him to be a commanding and persuasive speaker. William Lloyd Garrison, who witnessed the moment, was stunned and called the young man a prodigy. His natural talent was so apparent that these organizers immediately offered him a job as a traveling antislavery agent.
Woman's suffrage pioneer Elizabeth Cady Stanton described first hearing Douglass in these early days, saying that he stood "like an African prince, conscious of his dignity and power, grand wit, satire and indignation." She looked around at the greatest abolitionist orators utterly fixated on Douglass's magnetic stage presence, "laughing and crying by turns with his rapid flights from pathos to humor." For the rest of that day, "All other speakers seemed tame after Douglass." 10 Seemingly overnight h
e became an abolitionist luminary, a man telling the story of his escape into freedom so compellingly, so vividly, that he quickly claimed the attention of first the freedom circuit and then the nation.
There was only one problem with this success. He related his staggering story of rising up from slavery with such sophistication, such sudden and inspiring eloquence that many refused to believe that he was only three years out of bondage. Traveling across the country speaking with reformers, Douglass gained access to more and more books, newspapers, and conversations with his fellow abolitionist agitators—and these all served to stimulate his eager and retentive mind. John Collins, a white abolitionist who often traveled with him, reminded him to "Give us the facts . . . we will take care of the philosophy." They were uncomfortable not just with his opinions, but also with the increasingly polished and fluent way he expressed them. George Foster told him, "People won't believe you ever was a slave, Frederick, if you keep on this way." Collins patronizingly added, "Better to have a little of the plantation manner of speech than not; 'tis not best that you seem too learned."11
From that first moment when Douglass walked to the front of that Nantucket room and unleashed his rhetorical fire, his chief mentor and early protector was William Lloyd Garrison. The mild-looking, bespectacled man hid behind his gentle countenance an inner fire, a radicalism that, tied to the powerful authenticity of Douglass's own story, made the two a persuasive and effective team for many years. With Garrison's encouragement, he and Anna settled in Lynn, Massachusetts, with Douglass completely giving his heart to the small and publicly shunned abolitionist movement.
Douglass and Lincoln Page 4