John Brown
Whether a failure or not, the Harpers Ferry attack revealed in southern hearts a deep-rooted and growing fear of slave rebellion, especially one abetted by perceived northern fanatics. Even a plainly incompetent company of twenty-two men quickly became a looming threat intent on destroying their whole way of life. When letters from Frederick Douglass were found in Brown's captured baggage, Douglass had been quickly and dangerously drawn into the net of retribution.
Ironically, he had never wished to know any of the specifics of John Brown's planned attack on the vulnerable federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. Still, more than twelve years ago Brown had shared with Douglass at their very first meeting in 1847 an overarching hope of someday stirring slaves to rebellion. Fresh from his return from his first trip to England, after giving a speech, Douglass was invited into the Brown home in Springfield, Massachusetts, where the antislavery Brown was then living. After a plain meal of beef soup, Brown took the opportunity to try out his revolutionary ideas on the prominent black leader. By his fireside, Brown cautiously shared with Douglass his initial vision, which was not so much a general slave uprising as the creation of a small army operating in a series of quick incursions in the very heart of the South, using the shelter of the Allegheny Mountains for protection. Douglass remembered the captain as "lean, strong, and sinewy, of the best New England mold, built for times of trouble . . . " He found the white man impressive, his mouth "strong and square," with blue-gray eyes "full of light and fire."4
Their friendship continued over the next decade, and slowly, as Douglass drew away from the nonviolent moral suasion policy of the Garrisonians, he became more sympathetic to Brown's willingness to employ violence to attack slavery, especially after the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. Still, something held him back, despite his respect and fondness for Brown.
To Douglass's relief, he at last found himself safe on British soil, in the clear now. The trip to Europe had been long planned, but his need to escape quickly through Canada had hastened his departure. He courageously used his many speeches and appearances in Scotland and England over the next five months to make clear his admiration for his now-infamous friend, freely admitting he had not been as bold, as dedicated unto death as John Brown. In years to come, he had to endure the taunts of those who claimed he was a coward, unwilling to dare all at Harpers Ferry.
Douglass, who faced down death many times in his career, was clearly not a coward, but he freely admitted he was intent on staying alive to pursue his own goals, so that he could follow his own way to defeat slavery. He had been beaten on a Massachusetts railway car in protest over segregated travel and had endured savage beatings while enslaved. But Douglass claimed that the closest he had ever come to death was on an 1843 speaking tour in the small town of Pendleton, Indiana. As Douglass began their program, William White, a white abolitionist friend, observed a menacing group of men gathering at the edges of the crowd. Suddenly, the scene descended into violence, and Douglass saw White trapped in the midst of the mob. Seizing a club, Douglass swung wildly as he rushed into the ferocious crowd. As Douglass's weapon was knocked out of his hands, he tried to run, but he was hurled to the ground. An assailant clubbed Douglass's hand, shattering it. White saw the club raised again for a second blow to the prostrate Douglass, and sprinting toward his wounded comrade, he threw his body against the rioter. The blow averted, Douglass stumbled up, and he and his companion managed to dash away from their attackers. Years after the narrow escape, that violent morning still haunted his dreams. He often found himself going to sleep troubled, "thinking about Pendleton." For a reminder, he only had to look down at a hand that had never healed correctly, paining him the rest of his life.5
Frederick Douglass was well acquainted with danger; whenever critics maintained that he should have joined Brown at Harpers Ferry, he had no trouble rejecting the idea. His gifts were dramatically different from Brown's. For the rest of his days, his praise for Brown's sacrificial spirit would be unstinted and sincere, yet in the end, he had decided that he must live for his cause, not be a martyr to it.
In a letter written on the ship for readers of his newspaper (now renamed Frederick Douglass' Paper) and mailed upon his arrival in England, he reminded his countrymen, "John Brown has not failed. He has dropped an idea, equal to a thousand bombshells into the very Bastille of slavery. That idea will live and grow, and one day will, unless slavery is otherwise abolished, cover Virginia with sorrow and blood."6
While in England, Douglass's warm memories and familiar sights from his earlier sojourn comforted him in his exile, and he quickly took up his accustomed task of swaying as many listeners as he could reach. The crowds in the British Isles were ready once again to flock to his lectures, anxious to see the man so closely associated with John Brown. On the platform, Douglass's eyes burned with cool intensity. His voice was rich and sonorous, easily filling vast halls with the practiced dramatic pauses and cadences of a preacher. He was now forty-two and his body still had the powerful bearing of youth, broad shoulders and powerful arms imbuing him with an even greater presence. It was not hard to imagine that this man had once relied on his body for grueling physical labor. Francis Grimke, a fellow abolitionist and black clergyman, thought "Michelangelo would have delighted to chisel in marble, or cast in bronze that noble form and figure!" Spiritualist Margaret Fox remarked that his lectures "would set the people Crazy," adding she thought that he was "as fine looking as Ever."7
He held his impressive six-foot frame so firmly upright that he gave the impression of being taller than he was. When he spoke in public, his fluid and graceful movements conveyed a natural dignity and self-confident air. As Unitarian minister and abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson once strolled with Douglass, he thought to himself, "Make the most of this opportunity. You never before have walked the streets with so distinguished-looking a man, and you never will again."8
On December 7, 1859, Douglass's youngest child, twelve-year-old Annie, wrote him news from home:
My Dear Father,
I am proceeding in my gramar very well for my teacher says so. I am in the first reader and I can read. I expect that you will have a german letter from me in a very short time. I have learned another piece and it is a Ami Slavery. I am going to speak it in school. My piece is this.
He is not the man for me
Who buys or sells a slave
Not he who will not set him free
But send him to his grave
But he whose noble heart beats warm
For all men's life and liberty
Who loves alike each human form
That's the man for me.
It is in the Garland of Freedom and four verses of it. My letter will not be very long. Poor Mr. Brown is dead. That hard hearted man said he must die, and they took him in an open field and about a half mile from the jail and hung him . . .
From your affectionate Daughter,
Annie Douglass."9
The Douglass of 1859 was indeed a much more confident and accomplished man than the fugitive speaker of 1845. There was no escaping the exhilaration of this experience of freedom, abundantly displayed in Glasgow, Scotland, on March 26, 1860, in "American Constitution and the Slave," one of the most impressive speeches of his life. The address marked the end of his long and painful process of pulling away from his Garrisonian abolitionist roots and summation of his journey to independent thinking. Douglass's shift from Garrison's view (along with his having had the audacity to start his own newspaper) had made his old friend an implacable enemy.
To fully break from Garrison and his philosophies was wrenching, but Douglass had tired of conceding to the South their argument that the United States Constitution was a proslavery document. Further, he now resisted William Lloyd Garrison's often expressed notion that seceding from the Union was a viable option for northern states. Instead, Douglass came to view the Declaration of Independence's proclamation that "all men are created equal" as the pr
oper lens through which to understand the essential meaning of the Constitution. The Declaration spelled out America's ideals, leaving a firm hope for the redemption of the nation under the subsequent Constitution with the additions of the Bill of Rights.
To Garrison, however, Douglass's changing ideas were nothing less than "base and selfish."10Garrison was never one to tolerate such dissent, and their political differences turned personal and messy, to the point that Garrison's Liberator newspaper published allegations of an adulterous liaison between Douglass and his generous supporter and close ally Julia Griffiths, a white Englishwoman, who for some years had actually lived in the Douglass home.
The startling allegation was quickly and fervently denied, but with so many personal letters from that period lost or destroyed, it is today impossible to know if Garrison's audacious condemnation of his old friend was in fact true. Douglass published a calm, reassuring letter from his wife, Anna (though Anna had for years stoutly refused to learn to read or write), denying any strain or trouble from Julia Griffiths's presence in their lives. Eventually, the dispute settled into banked coals of simmering resentment, leaving real damage done to the abolitionist movement and untold personal anguish to Douglass himself. In the aftermath of the embarrassing imbroglio, Julia returned to England in 1855. Long after her marriage to an English clergyman named Crofts she continued to write Douglass and advise him with warmth and concern. The relationship was so sustaining and vital to Douglass that in 1859 he went directly from Liverpool to her new home in Halifax, from which he began his extensive speaking tour in England.
After years of self-taught legal and political study, he now felt fully prepared to repudiate Garrison's rejection of the Constitution. In the end, the nation's founding document "leans to freedom, not to slavery," and this could save the country. With a presidential contest impending back home, Douglass believed such truths made abolitionist hopes realistic, though the leading Republican candidate, New York senator William H. Seward, was hardly a raving abolitionist and Stephen Douglas loomed in the background as a viable Democratic candidate. Still, Douglass firmly staked his ground, believing "the way to abolish slavery in America is to vote such men into power as will use their power for the Abolition of slavery." It is hard to miss in this speech a wistful note that with great events on the horizon, he was achingly far from being able to influence such an outcome.
The background of this major address was his answering the taunts of Garrison abolitionists about changing his mind on these important ideas. His answer to them was direct and affecting, a rare personal opening for a man who seldom opened his heart. "When I escaped from slavery, twenty-two years ago, the world was all new to me, and if I had been in a hogshead with the bung in, I could not have been much more ignorant of many things than I was then. All I knew was that I had two elbows and a good appetite, and that I was a human being—a sort of non-descript creature, but still struggling for life." In this state of unfolding development, he had fallen under the spell of Garrison and his allies, and in his rapid and fervent efforts of creating himself as a speaker and as a man, he had naturally accepted their views and perspectives. "They were my friends, the friends of my people, and nothing was more natural than that I should receive as gospel all they told me."11
During his five months in exile, Douglass had moved on from the well-intentioned influences of past mentors to confront the meaning—the mission—of his life. Though he had planned to spend more time in England and was about to embark for the continent for further travel, to France and perhaps Germany, fate seized him in early 1860 with a cruel and shocking turn that propelled him home. He returned in time to witness the election of a new president and the long-foretold shattering of his country into warring factions.
On March 13, 1860, Douglass received a letter from home saying his youngest child was dead. In shock and guilt, he resolved to return home, immediately. Annie's death changed everything, and the England idyll was over in a bitter instant. No matter what possible dangers awaited him, he felt he had no choice as a father and husband but to return home to Rochester without delay.
A family friend described the little girl as "the gentle, darling little Annie, with her winning, modest shyness, but happy to trust to the friendly face of the lady who held her small, soft, velvety hand kindly while talking to her father and mother." Her sister called her "blithe and lively." In Douglass's own newspaper, Annie was affectionately called the "pet of her father." She possessed a carefree cheerfulness unmatched in the family.12
Yet even at her young age, she had developed a passion for the work of her father. In fact, it was a belief within the family that shock from the death of John Brown had somehow contributed to her death. To Annie, "poor Mr. Brown" was not an abstract martyr; he had stayed with the Douglass family for a long stretch in 1858 and insisted on paying three dollars a week in board. During this time, the stern old man occasionally showed a more tender side, captivating the imagination of young Annie when she sat on his knee.13In front of Douglass's children, Brown used planed boards and dividers to depict a chain of fortification in the mountains for his abolitionist guerillas. Douglass often did not quite know what to make of the wild designs, commenting that "I was less interested in these drawings than my children were." Annie obviously had had great difficulty processing Brown's death—perhaps Douglass could have helped her deal with this grief had he not been in England during that highly sensitive time.14
Douglass's oldest daughter, Rosetta, reported in a family letter that they had heard from their father, and "his grief was great." But it is her next sentence that is particularly powerful: "I trust that the next letter will evince more composure of mind." Such anguished sadness was to be expected from a father who has lost a child. (Later, in Douglass's narrative, he quickly passes over Annie's death. In their brevity and simplicity, however, these few sentences capture Douglass's heart: calling her the "light and life of my house," he was "deeply distressed by this bereavement.")15Letters from those close to him suggest that Douglass grieved many years over his daughter's death. Friends continued to show concern for Douglass's sorrow throughout the Civil War.
For a girl with ardent attachments to her father combined with an "excitable temperament," her father's self-exile with no immediate prospect of return apparently caused her great anxiety for his safety. Hearing adults talk of Brown's death and her father's possible future punishment, Annie retreated from the world, losing her power to speak or hear. The medical cause of her death was never clear, and it seems odd to have Douglass's interpretation of her death in a letter he wrote "To My British Anti-Slavery Friends," as "resulting, no doubt, from over-anxiety for the safety of her father, and deep sorrow for the death of dear old John Brown, upon whose knee she had often sat only a few months before."16In that letter, he promised to return to finish his speaking tour, but it was not to be. Claims of America pressed in on every side.17
Acting upon a quick impulse without careful thought, he took the first outgoing ship headed to America. Determined to be with his family, he now displayed as much courage as he had ever summoned in a long career. The prospect of being a free man in Europe was a heady prospect, especially if circumstances forced such an exile upon him. Had Annie not died, it is impossible to know when Douglass might have returned to the United States. He knew well that he might be risking his life when he boarded to return to his homeland. A fall and a severe injury to his shoulder only worsened the misery of the return trip.18
The city of Rochester that Douglass returned to after Annie's death had been his home for more than ten years. His homecoming from England in 1860 proved to be quiet and subdued. He prudently laid low upon rejoining his grieving family because for weeks, he still feared extradition to Virginia. Yet, luck was with him in that the congressional committee appointed to track down John Brown's allies and supporters had dissolved into a largely fruitless effort and in the end found no evidence tying Douglass to the plotting of the raid. In addition, with
the nation absorbed with the upcoming presidential contest, even southern congressmen had seemed to lose their bloodlust for revenge over Harpers Ferry. With the whole country facing potential disaster, Brown's raid had receded, a precursor to an infinitely larger looming cataclysm. Douglass, having feared the worst, found himself pleasantly amazed that the danger to him seemed to be fading. The congressional committee eventually gave up its work, and within three months Douglass returned to the high visibility he had previously enjoyed. As the presidential campaign year of 1860 proceeded, Douglass stood ready to influence its outcome as effectively as he could by a new grueling, nearly frantic speaking tour.
It was his newspaper, Frederick Douglass'Paper, that made his life difficult. He wondered if he should end the effort. Upon his return from England, there is disappointment and exhaustion in his words, describing "nearly thirteen years of effort . . . I am now very sorry to give up the effort." The temptation to give up his life as an editor and publisher was not a pose, but a symptom of the dismal state Douglass was feeling in 1860. These difficulties had a long story, and Douglass well understood why so many black-edited newspapers failed. In 1848, he had mortgaged his home to keep the paper from collapsing. At one point, he was fifteen hundred dollars in debt, no trifling sum in 1855. Finding subscribers was a constant struggle throughout this period, though he averaged around 3,000 subscribers. Overhead costs always seemed to mount. When Douglass returned from England, he found the paper running at around a $30 deficit per week. He decided at once to cease publication, but the pleas of readers convinced him to continue. Soon he was losing $50 a week.19
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