William Lloyd Garrison
Douglass's personal charisma and renowned eloquence made him an important public figure, though in antebellum America it was astonishing that any black man could claim such status. He spoke mostly from rough manuscripts, and from surviving multiple newspaper transcriptions of certain speeches he gave repeatedly, we know that they differed according to the venue and the feeling of the moment. He departed freely from his notes, such was his sure confidence as an orator. This element of his fame, the accomplished manner in which he varied his tone from thunderous rousing calls to sly mimicry, then moments of earthy humor, all these things galvanized his listeners. One observer remembered seeing Douglass stalk from one edge of the platform to another, "all roused up like a Numidian Lion," concluding he was seeing something more than an eloquent address: "He was an insurgent slave taking hold on the right of speech."12
From 1841 on, his life was one of incessant, grueling travel. Each year was punctuated by these long speaking circuits across all of the northern states, though he felt increasingly nervous whenever speaking engagements came within striking distance of the South. What made him interesting, exotic, and controversial in the free states made him a marked man whenever he neared the border state of Kentucky, his old home state of Maryland, and even southern Pennsylvania, where kidnapping was commonplace. His was a difficult and lonely life. It was not simply the dusty travel, the wear of three-hour lectures on his throat, the poor food along the way, but the debilitating sense of danger and degradation at every stop. Though a famous orator, and increasingly well-paid, he was still a black man. The difficulties of arranging travel, managing to find a place to stay the night, wondering what kind of mob might greet him at the site of each night's speech—none of these things ever subsided before the Civil War.
Frederick Douglass, circa 1850, after 1847 daguerreotype by an unidentified artist
Then, in 1845, he made one of the most audacious moves of his life. The publication of his memoir of his early years in slavery, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, was a provocation in itself, but Douglass also dared to reveal personal information about his life as a free man. These facts were enticing to those who wanted the young abolitionist speaker snatched back into the slavery out of which he had come. He almost taunted his former owner Thomas Auld to recapture him by not only revealing the name his owner had known him by, Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, but by actually mailing the slaveholder a copy of the book. When the book became an unexpected bestseller, worried friends realized that he was now in some danger and arranged for him to go to England to represent the American abolitionist movement. At the time, this escape to England was a disheartening reminder that no matter with what confidence and dexterity Douglass comported himself on abolitionism platforms of the North, he was still someone's property back in Maryland. More southern men than just Auld wanted him back and silenced.
The 1845 visit to England made Douglass an international figure and without question the most prominent black abolitionist on either side of the Atlantic. At speeches all over the north of England and Scotland, thousands came to hear him. In the midst of such interest bordering on adulation, he was reminded that in Britain he was perceived as a different category of person. "Why, sir, the Americans do not know that I am a man. They talk of me as a box of goods; they speak of me in connection with sheep, horses and cattle. But here, how different! Why, sir, the very dogs of old England know that I am a man!"13Then, he had written to his abolitionist mentor, William Lloyd Garrison, that the English experience was a powerful one, with "the entire absence of anything that looked like racial prejudice against me, on account of the colour of my skin—contrasted so strongly with my long and bitter experience in the United States, that I look with wonder and amazement at the transition."14
The trip was extremely successful; generous British admirers had gathered enough money to pay off his old owner. At last he was a free man. Upon his return from his sojourn in England, Douglass celebrated his newfound freedom by forging a new life in many directions. He moved Anna and their young children into a new home in Rochester, New York, and decided to offer a strong voice by editing The North Star, a rival newspaper to Garrison's Liberator. He did this, he admitted, "without a day's schooling . . . I could hardly spell two words correctly . . ."15This decision to create a black-owned and edited newspaper was to become a painful wedge in his old partnership with Garrison. In the end, Douglass's inner need to make his own way, to express his own brand of abolitionism, could not be denied or repressed, no matter how much he owed to the man who had first urged him to greatness. There was a destiny for him that Garrison could not support. Garrison had needed a former slave to tell a tale of salvation; Douglass wanted something more, to push himself to the very limit of his abilities and talents. Not even Garrison's sincere and radical abolitionism could accept such independence and personal autonomy on the part of a black man.
In the mid-nineteenth century, Rochester, the City of Flowers, was known to have few rivals for beauty among American cities. Blossoming tulips, roses, and fruit trees adorned the city. A resident wrote to a friend in 1827, "Rochester is the best place we have yet seen for giving strangers an idea of the newness of this country."16For Douglass, looking to begin anew, it had seemed the perfect place for a self-made man, one intent on being a writer, editor, and publisher, not only an abolitionist circuit speaker.
Though it looked like an old New England town, Rochester was first founded in 1817. The city grew quickly, gaining 8,000 residents in ten years. It went from forest to boomtown overnight. Much of its success came from the opening of the Erie Canal and, later, being on the route of the New York Central railroad. The awe-inspiring power and beauty of the waterfalls of the Genesee River helped Rochester earn its place in early America's folklore in 1829, when a daring man named Sam Patch jumped 120 feet into the main falls. Widely publicized beforehand, a mesmerized crowd watched the inebriated Patch's arms flailing all the way down, a leap from which he would never emerge.17
Rochester's black population was small, numbering less than 3 percent of the population in 1834. Yet, Douglass found abolitionist allies—white and black—that proved especially useful for conducting the Underground Railroad. Rochester was the last stop for thousands of frantic flights to freedom ending in Canada, across Lake Ontario. It was not uncommon for Douglass to arrive at work at the North Star press offices with tired and hungry fugitives waiting on the steps for his aid. As "superintendent" of the Rochester station, Douglass knew the obscure places to hide: barns, lofts, woodsheds, attics, anywhere a fugitive could be safe for a time. His newspaper office even had a trap door leading to a clandestine stairway. Douglass and his wife, Anna, fed them and gave them train fare to complete their journey, or placed them in boats heading across the lake. One evening Douglass realized he had eleven fugitives staying with his family. Despite the danger, he would later say, "I never did more congenial, attractive, fascinating and satisfactory work." Although he was realistic about the overall effectiveness of the Underground Railroad, he admitted that " . . . as a means of destroying slavery, it was like an attempt to bail out the ocean with a teaspoon . . .,"18Having been a slave, however, even one less soul in bondage brought him great joy. The southern shore of Lake Ontario was a vista of freedom for his soul and the route to freedom for many fugitives.19
The North Star debuted in 1847 with the slogan, "Right is of no Sex— Truth is of no Color—God is Father of us all, and we are all Brethren." Writing for this antislavery periodical day after day, week after week, forced Douglass to refine and further articulate his ideas. Years later he felt that the clarity with which he spoke during the Civil War had come from the long nights of work and developing his thinking in the newspaper years of the 1850s. The pressure of constant deadlines meant this life "was the best school possible for me." Often Douglass would write all day and then hop on a train for a town hosting his evening speaking engagement.
If the engagement finished in time, he would catch a train back to Rochester, otherwise he stayed the night in whatever hamlet he found himself, still managing to be back in his office as early as possible. The office was not elaborate—simply a small single room with an old printing press, cases of type all along the wall, a desk for Douglass to write, and a fireplace to warm him through long Rochester winters.20
Douglass was a very careful man in dealing out the details of his personal life. Matters of the heart, especially, were kept carefully hidden, even as he seemed to fully share his redemptive journey from slave to citizen. In hundreds of pages of autobiography, he related what he felt he needed to in order to accomplish his life's mission of ending slavery—and not a whit more. Each slave, every black soul, was meant to be redeemed in Douglass's Pilgrim i Progress to freedom; inner confusions, the toll of constant racial belit-tlements, and struggles within his own immediate family had no part in the tale he wished to tell. Above all, he wished to portray himself as someone whose potential not even slavery could destroy.
In essentially raising himself—without the ordinary supports of family or sustained childhood friendships—he was slavery's child, growing up in emotionally barren and harsh circumstances, a desert devoid of love and simple protection. That the damage done was so hidden and carefully managed is a remarkable sign of powerful internal strength. In an era that celebrated the doctrine of self-creation, he was after all truly the self-created man par excellence.
Dating back to Tom Paine's vision that in America "we have it in our power to begin the world over again,"21self-creation is the American ideal. The intensity and fervor of Douglass's oft-delivered addresses on this theme reflect something more arduous than simply the ideology of the economically rising man. In his Collected Papers, three versions of the talk—often revised and refreshed to reflect further ruminations upon his own life—are preserved, from 1859 to a final draft in 1893. (In this final draft, he calls Abraham Lincoln: "the King of American self-made men; the man who rose highest and will be remembered as the most popular and beloved President since Washington. This man came to us, not from the schools or from the mansions of eases and luxury, but from the backwoods.")22
Douglass championed hard work, industry, and well-tempered zeal as qualities crucial for greatness that is earned, not given. He defined such souls as "men, who under peculiar difficulties and without ordinary helps of favoring circumstances, have attained knowledge, usefulness, power and position . . ."In clear reference to his own "peculiar difficulties," he further defined the obstacles to selfhood: "not only without the voluntary assistance or friendly co-operation of society, but often in open and derisive defiance of all the efforts of society . . . to repress, retard and keep them down." In the end, these men were "indebted to themselves for themselves." From poverty and from "hunger, rags, and destitution, they have come; motherless and fatherless, they have come, and may come."
Douglass used these extraordinarily personal references as instructive themes in his frequent "self-made" discourses. The extreme impoverishment, both emotional and economic, of his early years was displayed for more than personal vindication or self-aggrandizement—it was transformed into an extremely eloquent and persuasive argument for the vast unrealized potential of his people. He pointed to "genuine heroism" of anyone who could triumph against such imposing odds, but that was not really the point of the lecture: "Every instance of such success is an example and a help to humanity."23
The most revealing aspect of his "self-made" talk, however, is a little noted coda at its conclusion. Despite the admiration such men deserved, Douglass confessed, "I am far from considering them the best made men. Their symmetry is often marred by the effects of their extra exertion . . . the long and rugged road over which they have been compelled to travel, have left their marks, sometimes quite visibly and unpleasantly, upon them." (He then alluded to editor Horace Greeley, who was said to be a self-made man who "worshipped his maker.") He added, "A self-made man is also likely to be full of contrarieties. He may be large, but at the same time, awkward; swift, but ungraceful; a man of power, but deficient in the polish and amiable proportions of the affluent and regularly educated man."24
Douglass clearly felt these "contrarieties," though few would have witnessed outer awkwardness in his own regal and refined demeanor—but the description applied extraordinarily well to Abraham Lincoln, whose awkwardness and lack of urbane polish was legendary.
CHAPTER 3
To the Brink
All night long in dense fog, Frederick Douglass's ship, the Nova Sco-tian, lay just outside of Liverpool, the great English port promising both freedom and a long exile from his homeland, wife, five children, and a vocation. Sending up rockets, blowing whistles, burning blue lights, and firing cannon into the murk did nothing to part the disorienting haze. It was late November 1859 and Douglass found himself once again cast into the role of fugitive with no way of envisaging his future course.
As he waited for the crowded docks of bustling Liverpool to at last come into view, Douglass faced a different kind of danger. Although Douglass was now technically a free man, this present threat was as perilous to his freedom as his first anxious escape to England twelve years before. As he prepared to give his "Self-Made Men" lecture at Philadelphia's National Hall, word reached him that in the aftermath of the Harpers Ferry raid, letters from him had been found in Captain John Brown's belongings, which put him in grave danger. Governor Henry Wise of Virginia wanted Douglass indicted for abetting Brown's recent bloody attempt to seize a federal arsenal. He even sent a private detective to track him down beyond the continental United States. If any boat intercepted a British ship carrying Douglass, Wise announced, he wanted the "privilege of seeing him well hung."1Worse, President James Buchanan, clearly anxious to appease the governor, had ordered federal marshals to arrest Douglass. They had been only steps behind him for weeks. Douglass had been extraordinarily lucky so far to have evaded them. After the daring raid electrified the country, a terrified South wanted vengeance. Strangely, through either a sense of wounded innocence or bravado, Douglass wasted valuable time in Philadelphia by casually going about his previous plans. With word of Governor Wise's declaration spreading, every minute was imperative.
At this point, someone Douglass did not even know likely saved his life. Officials in Washington, D.C., sent a telegraph to the sheriff of Philadelphia County to apprehend Douglass. The telegraph came in to a local operator named James Hern, who happened to be an avowed abolitionist. Hern managed to delay the delivery of the telegraph three vital hours, just long enough for a warning of its content to reach Douglass. By the time the telegraph arrived on the sheriff's desk, Douglass had left Philadelphia and was on his way home to Rochester.
Douglass had allowed himself to think his home city would be safer, but he had been home only a matter of minutes when he learned that law enforcement agents were closing in on him. The choice was now clear: he needed a way out of the country. His long experience as a trusted conductor on the Underground Railroad now came into play, as he was spirited from Rochester across Lake Ontario to momentary safety in Clifton, Canada, then to Hamilton, Toronto, and finally a hasty all-night train trip to Montreal. Yet even there, rumors of capture swirled about him, so he moved on to Quebec, with "the snow eight inches deep, cracking under one's feet with the sharp cover-your-ears sound . . . The sleigh bells are ringing, and the Frenchmen and their ponies are dashing through the streets . . . " He enjoyed the sights of the Old Town for only a day, and on November 12, he set sail for England.2 Boarding the ship, he wondered if he might be going into exile for the rest of his life.
All this had come from Douglass having listened over the years, sometimes with admiration and sometimes with severe misgiving, to his friend Captain Brown's audacious schemes for a southern slave insurrection. There had been so many conversations, hushed late night consultations, expectant discussions of invasion over unrolled maps. Most recently, Douglass and
Brown had shared an anguished farewell in an isolated stone quarry in Cham-bersburg, Pennsylvania, after Douglass finally refused to join in the doomed crusade.
Although Brown had shown in Kansas that he was not afraid of a little blood on his hands (or pools of it from five broadsword-hacked men on the creeks of Osawatomie, Kansas), the long years of frustrated planning, fundraising, delays, and perplexing changes of direction had made it seem as if Brown's violent scheme would go unfulfilled forever. But then, less than a month after their last conversation in Chambersburg, the old man had suddenly struck, at last making good on his long-nurtured plan of slave revolution.
Though every aspect of the ill-thought-out plan had gone disastrously wrong, proving to be exactly the fiasco Douglass had feared it would be, it was strange how little this had mattered to Brown's desired hope of terrorizing the slaveholders he so abhorred. While nearly the whole raiding party had been quickly and effectively killed or captured, Brown, as he awaited hanging, had a martyr's satisfaction in suddenly finding himself a hated specter of insurrection to the South and, as well, an unexpected hero to many in the North. Abraham Lincoln, invited to speak at the prestigious Cooper Union Institute in New York in 1860, took the opportunity to reflect another common reaction among the free states: "John Brown's effort was peculiar. It was not a slave insurrection. It was an attempt by white men to get up a revolt among slaves, in which the slaves refused to participate. In fact, it was so absurd that the slaves, with all their ignorance, saw plainly enough that it could not succeed."3
Douglass and Lincoln Page 5