From month to month, his speaking engagements kept the enterprise afloat. As much as the paper meant to him, Douglass wearily confided to a friend, "I see nothing for me but to let the paper go down."20Yet time and time again, generous gifts from abolitionist and philanthropist Gerrit Smith had kept the newspaper alive in an era when Douglass's voice was a powerful national influence. The best he could do was to keep the paper alive as a monthly publication, with reduced pages and paper size.
The home he retreated to after his exhausting daily pace was a half-hour walk from the pressroom situated in the center of downtown Rochester. Sitting on a hill, surrounded by gardens, fruit trees and farmland, it seemed to be an island away from the world for Douglass. This rural retreat, their second home in Rochester, was far enough from the city to allow Douglass to rest from his intense busy public life and into a private world, one shrouded in secrecy that no amount of research is likely to fully pierce.21
His marriage to Anna was both a comfort as well as a hidden source of pain and unfulfillment over the years. She was dutiful, loyal, supportive, and clearly valued her husband as a great man, worthy of her total focus. They were both devoted to their children, and the home they created was filled with children growing with encouragement from him and firm discipline and care from her. Rosetta, whose short biography of her mother is the fullest account of Anna that survives, was the oldest, born in 1839; Lewis followed the next year. Two more boys, Frederick, Jr. and Charles, were born before Douglass went to England in 1845, and Annie was born in 1849 after his return as a free man.
Yet, despite his devotion to his children, in 1848 Douglass had described himself as a "most unhappy man." Moreover, three years before the Civil War, Douglass wrote to a friend that, "if I should write down all her complaints there would be no room even to put my name at the bottom."22
Douglass and Anna had profoundly different approaches to the world of ideas. He constantly pressured her to absorb new ideas, but she never shared his intellectual interests. She never learned to read, although he set up numerous opportunities for her to do so. Douglass's feelings on their differences were never clearer than when he was commenting on a letter, noting someone had to read it "over and over again until Dear Anna shall fully understand their contents."23
Anna provided her husband a firm foundation, a clean home, food and comforts, clean linens, smoothly ironed suits. All these practical things were the work of her own hands, as was caring for the fugitive slaves that came into the Douglass household. When Douglass was ill during his frequent bouts with bronchitis, she sat by his bedside and cared for him. Yet, her dedication to these tasks in lieu of mental stimulation was problematic for a man with a restless mind like Douglass. The relationship also suffered from their frequent separations, as he traveled incessantly, including two long stays in Europe. Rosetta wrote that when he was home, "Father was mother's honored guest."24
Anna Douglass
Regardless of the state of their marriage, Douglass was extraordinarily proud of his family, perhaps especially so because as a boy he had suffered having all family supports stripped away. Anna raised their five children, and he was devoted to them even if he was the epitome of the absentee father. She was frugal and stern with the children, and they realized they would have a more successful chance pleading their case with their father after transgressions. Her criticisms could be blunt and harsh, whether she directed them at family members or guests.
Anna had friends in New Bedford and Lynn, but she never grew close with anyone in Rochester, retreating into her home and into herself. Douglass wanted her to travel more with him, but Anna simply felt more comfortable tending to matters in the home and in her garden. Mostly, she felt unease around the plethora of white visitors her husband brought to the house. After preparing and serving the meal, she was content to retire to the back porch and her rocking chair. Rosetta, however, recalled her mother talking with her father about certain current events, especially in the anti-slavery movement.25
The marriage may have been strained also by Douglass's inviting white female friends and associates to stay in the family home for long stretches of time. His relationship with Julia Griffiths provoked many rumors. When the writer Ottilie Assing entered his life in the early 1850s, she most certainly claimed his bed. Assing spent summers in the Douglass family home over a decade and Douglass often stayed with her in her home in Hoboken, New Jersey. Assing was German-born and raised on European cultural values and liberal revolutions. She had come to America at age thirty-three to work as a journalist and immediately comprehended the promise of the abolitionist movement. When she heard about the strikingly handsome former slave Frederick Douglass, she desired to meet this great man. As emotional as she was intellectual, she excited and captivated Douglass. They would garden, cook, play croquet, and read together. Her letters to her sister describe an idyllic scene of two lovers feeding peaches and cherries to each other, while enjoying the lush, picturesque region around Rochester. They hiked the mountains, explored the countryside, strolled and sailed along the Genesee River.26
Douglass's letters over three decades reveal that, outside of his family, those closest to him were European women, especially Julia Griffiths and Rosine Draz (another friend from his English sojourns). Like Assing, they were educated, intellectual women, who shared unwavering devotion and adoration of him.
His twenty-five-year relationship with Assing never caused Douglass to leave his marriage for several reasons. Because of his role as the most prominent black leader in America, divorce in the 1860s was simply not an option. After all, Douglass's career was bound up in a vivid presentation of his own life for the perceived benefit of his people; in an era when divorce was uncommon and disdained, it would have devastated his public persona and influence. Furthermore, Douglass wrote that he believed slavery created a crippling social system with no use for family. Thus, to give up the family he had created in lieu of the one denied to him would be to abandon part of what he had won by becoming free. Regardless of Assing, Douglass did have a profound love for his family, not just in an abstract sense but in the day-today reality of his life. He may or may not have felt guilt for a love life that he did not try hard to hide within the family itself, yet his actions throughout the Civil War years show how much his children truly meant to him, and the extent to which he would go to protect and help them.
On the eve of the great presidential race, Douglass felt lost in "months of anxiety, sickness, sorrow and death."27Memories from a tortured past, a floundering paper, a fading marriage, a secret interracial affair, and the death of his youngest and most beloved daughter were all part of the mountain of baggage Douglass was carrying. These disappointments and his pressing need to keep much of himself hidden to the world wore at him, along with the constant fatigue of touring about the country.
Ottilie Assing
Yet, these personal problems were not the only causes of his profound despair. The excitement and firm idealism of the late 1840s had been tested by a long decade of setbacks, and a case could be made that abolitionism was weaker than ever by 1860 in terms of national support, despite the fact that increasing numbers of white northerners identified with the cause. On the political side, the previous decade had begun with the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Law that federally sanctioned taking any black person into slavery with virtually no legal recourse. Even worse, in 1857 the Dred Scott decision by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney's Supreme Court acknowledged slavery as an institution with no legal restraints and boundaries, even in the free states, despite those states' laws against the "peculiar institution." After all of Douglass's heartfelt and heartrending speeches, all the meetings and prayers for the cause, it was profoundly dispiriting for those toiling for more than twenty-five years to read the chief justice's words: "The black man had no rights that the white man had any right to respect." The ruling made brutally clear that black people were not, and might never be, citizens of the United States. The decade conclu
ded with John Brown's execution in Virginia.
By April, notwithstanding his despair, Douglass was speaking widely, reclaiming his status as the most prominent black voice in America. The times were indeed discouraging, but events were also arising that were remarkable and potentially fruitful in terms of who might replace the ineffective and dithering President James Buchanan. In that month, at the Democratic national convention, Stephen Douglas's chances for the presidency were dealt a deathblow when his party broke into two sectional factions, with southern delegates distrustful of him and at the last moment deciding to back Ken-tuckian John C. Breckenridge instead. Then, in early May the newly formed Constitutional Union party nominated John Bell, further splitting the Democratic opposition. For a political organization as young as the Republican party, suddenly its prospects were bright and the nomination highly prized. That candidate would be the next president.
As the Republicans gathered in Chicago in mid-May, Illinois native son candidate Abraham Lincoln (likely angling for an advantageous position to be his state's next senator) seemingly out of nowhere became, on the third ballot, the party's compromise candidate, everyone's favored second choice. Douglass had long thought his New York senator, William Seward, would garner the honor. In his paper, he lamented that Seward, who had been instrumental in shaping Republican antislavery ideology, was "shoved aside to make room for a man whose abilities are untried and whose political history too meager to form a basis on which to judge his future."28The first true western candidate, Lincoln was as little harmed by the sudden emergence of his rail-splitter persona as by the shrewd dealing of his campaign managers. In the end, he won because delegates had developed an admiration for his clear, cogent speeches that had so effectively demarcated a winning position against Stephen Douglas.
Wasting not a moment, Douglass assessed his man in positive terms, something fellow abolitionists for the most part resisted, in an editorial headed "The Chicago Nominations." He claimed Lincoln was "a radical Republican, and is fully committed to the doctrine of the 'irrepressible conflict.'" In his debates with Senator Douglas, he came fully up to "the highest mark of Republicanism, and he is a man of will and nerve . . ." Noting that "Illinois will form a sort of pivot," he felt "the old personal rivalry between him [Douglas] and Mr. Lincoln will render the campaign especially spicy."29Douglass predicted to a friend that if Lincoln won the election, Seward would be the nominee in 1864.30
For the most part, Douglass in his public writings about Lincoln during the election season endeavored to keep a positive tone. Remembering Lincoln's 1858 stern warning that the nation could not endure half-slave, half-free, he realized Lincoln might not be an abolitionist but seemed to be a man of strong character and perceptive insight into the national predicament. Douglass called him "calm, cool, deliberate." He complimented Lincoln's " . . . well balanced head; great firmness of will" and called him "one of the most frank, honest men in political life." Yet, he had to admit even these good qualities hardly qualified him to be a presidential nominee, especially in such a critical hour. He doubted that Lincoln knew anything of literary culture or diplomatic skill. At best, the Republicans nominated him based on their faith in his potential.31
In August of 1860 Douglass wrote a doubt-ridden article entitled "The Prospect in the Future." He told his readers that the work of the last twenty-five years had "reached a point of weary hopelessness." A month before, Douglass had told fellow journalist and abolitionist James Redpath that although he had labored to write and speak, it was for people without "ears or hearts for the appeals of justice and humanity." Slaveholders were "beyond the reach of moral and humane consideration," and the only thing that could end slavery was the threat of death to them. He was reduced to "little hope of the freedom of the slave by peaceful means."32
As the summer of I860 faded into autumn, Douglass became more excited about the upcoming presidential contest than any previous election. He decided to throw himself into the race with "former faith and more ardent hope than ever before."33He was excited because the choice was extraordinarily clear as to whether an American's vote would hinder or help the slave. He believed that this election would be an opportunity to educate the American people on his emancipation agenda. Whom he would actually vote for was a more complicated question.
There were other facts that gave Douglass serious pause. As the election drew closer, Douglass learned Lincoln had not signed a petition in the Illinois legislature that would give black people the right to give evidence in court against a white person. Lincoln was against black suffrage and showed little aversion to implementation of the Fugitive Slave Law. What worried Douglass more was a lesson from the nation's recent history. The past few presidents had also been relative political unknowns, selected over more substantive candidates based on their having accumulated fewer enemies. They had turned out to be weak, vacillating leaders, of the disastrous ilk of Franklin Pierce and the overwhelmed James Buchanan, then presiding over the impending sundering of the country. What Douglass saw was "one host of incompetent kin folks takes the place of another." Douglass found the thought of this trend continuing deeply distressing, and this nonentity Lincoln promised more of the same. In this crucial election, "the road to the Presidency does not lead through the swamps of compromise and concession any longer."34
Douglass was never satisfied with the new Republican party for one simple reason: They were more against slavery's political power and sway than against slavery itself. He thought they opposed slavery in places only where white people did not want to deal with the institution, or for that matter, the actuality of black fellow citizens. Republicans wished to keep the western territories free of slavery under a stirring cry for "free labor," all the wrhile enacting laws to restrict the free blacks living amongst them. Douglass ridiculed this covert racism.
Douglass was realistic enough to know a political party that pushed abolition and equality—as the Liberty party showed all too well in its ineffective appeal—would face electoral disaster. Thus, he developed mixed feelings about the election, knowing a Republican victory could present new possibilities for hurting the proslavery powers and clearing the way for more moral antislavery advocacy—even as he still felt compelled to support explicitly abolitionist candidates. In the end, he believed the significance of this vital election was "The slaveholders know that the day of their power is over when a Republican President is elected." Practically speaking, he desired Lincoln's victory, but could not cast his personal vote, which the state of New York allowed, for anyone not in favor of immediate, unconditional emancipation.35
His stance drew criticism. One Republican party member had written to him the year before: "The only difference between us is, that one acts on the practical side of the question, and the other on the theoretic. It is all very fine to talk about the short-comings of the Republican Party, but the question is, What are you going to do about it?"36The answer was to vote for his friend Gerrit Smith, whose futile candidacy might still send a message about the political power of radical abolitionism. Still, in the back of his mind was the hope that a Lincoln victory would begin a new era of antislavery advocacy, and even better, that the president would come to demonstrate "growth in grace."37
As the election drew closer, most of Douglass's energies went toward a campaign to defeat a New York state law necessitating that a black man have at least two hundred and fifty dollars in real property to be able to vote. He spoke throughout the state about this injustice and wrote a pamphlet entitled "The Suffrage Question in Relation to Colored Voters in the State of New York." On November 4, Election Day, Douglass stood at a polling place in Rochester from dawn to dusk. Douglass's cause failed by a two-to-one margin, but there was bigger news from the day.38
Abraham Lincoln was elected sixteenth president of the United States, a minority president to be sure with less than 40 percent of the vote, but elected nonetheless with 180 electoral votes. His rival Stephen Douglas received respectable vote totals from
both North and South, but ended his national career, getting only 12 electoral votes from Missouri and New Jersey, far fewer than John Breckenridge, 72, and John Bell, 39.
On election day, Lincoln betrayed no nervousness—recent state elections in Pennsylvania and Ohio had already indicated that, with his opponents so divided, his election was almost assured. He spent most of the evening in the telegraph office until past midnight, when news from New York confirmed his election, and then he ambled home to inform his wife, Mary.
Four days later, South Carolina began the process of formal secession from the Union. Lincoln seemed sanguine, writing, "Rest fully assured, that the good people of the South who will put themselves in the same temper and mood towards me which you do, will find no cause to complain of me." In the next four months, the president-elect issued no policy statement or made any effort to quell the rising tide of secession. He maintained a steady silence in public, only occasionally writing letters to his supporters in stalwart and encouraging words with little policy to them.39
Lincoln seemed to feel that he understood the southern mind and heart, that his good will would somehow prevail in the crisis, despite each day's further unsettling news. The only firm signal he sent from Springfield was to reinforce a stance he had articulated many times in the last six years, ever since his Peoria speech of 1854, that stopping the extension of slavery was his sole unyielding line of policy. To Illinois senator Lyman Trumbull, a convenient conduit for getting the policy word out, Lincoln wrote, "Let there be no compromise on the question of extending slavery. If there be, all our labor is lost, and, ere long, must be done again . . . Have none of it. Stand firm. The tug has to come, & better now, than any time hereafter."40
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