February 1818–February 20, 1895
HIGHEST RANK:
Abolitionist Leader
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN:
Aquarius or Pisces
NICKNAMES:
The Lion of Anacostia
WORDS TO REMEMBER:
“We must … reach the slaveholder’s conscience through his fear of personal danger. We must make him feel that there is death in the air around him, that there is death in the pot before him, that there is death all around him.”
A wet Frederick Douglass fumed. It was a rainy evening in Rochester, New York, and the Congress Hall Hotel had no rooms to let. So he marched around the corner to the Waverly House, only to be told, once again, that there were no vacancies. That did it. Trembling as much from rage as from the damp, he impolitely reminded the clerk who he was and insisted he be given a room. Douglass had just arrived back in the city after receiving a telegram the day before that his house had burned down, and he was in no mood for the usual bigotry that greeted black patrons in hotel lobbies. The clerk, no doubt aware of the famous Rochesterian’s identity (and probably having read in the newspaper that his house was now a hissing ruin), apologetically explained that, no kidding, there really were no rooms available. Douglass backed off, concealing his embarrassment with a tempestuous exit. He ended up locating his family members at a neighbor’s house and spending the night there.
The Waverly House was indeed full of guests—including, interestingly enough, a few who happened to be black. The following day, Douglass would see the charred husk that had been his beloved home for twenty-five years, lost—along with piles and piles of invaluable letters and documents—to a fire that was almost certainly caused deliberately. It was a pathetic moment for a great man who, not eight years earlier, had been welcome in the White House in the midst of the worst war the nation had ever known. But Frederick Douglass couldn’t remember a time when arson didn’t immediately spring to mind when a prominent black person’s house burned to the ground; or, for that matter, when it was possible to take a hotel clerk at his word when he told a black man that no rooms were available.
In a time when few blacks dared to raise their voices in anger, Frederick Douglass wasn’t afraid to berate a white hotel clerk who refused to give him a room.
Douglass could remember vividly, however, when the possibility of owning a house that anybody would want to torch was as laughably inconceivable as rudely challenging a white clerk’s judgment and getting away with it. Once upon a time, such things were as remote from Douglass’s experience as the rings of Saturn. Back then, in the hard world that had made and scarred him, he was known by another name: Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey. He was born a slave to a slave woman, though he never knew her well. She was dead by the time he was eight. As for Frederick’s father, he was not a slave but a white man whose identity would never be decided beyond doubt. On Maryland’s eastern shore, where Frederick grew up, slaves lived a life of extreme anticipation on bondage’s frontier: with Pennsylvania and freedom beckoning to the north, masters kept their property on a tight leash or, worse, “sold them south” to Mississippi or Alabama, as far away from the Underground Railroad as one could get. Frederick would see some fifteen of his close relatives disappear to such a fate before he seized his own freedom.
The seeds of escape were sown in his mind when he was still young. Sent to work in Baltimore for the Auld family, he became the recipient of an astonishing breach of the master’s code: On her own initiative, Sophia Auld, intrigued by the boy’s sharp mind, began teaching him how to spell and read. He was a quick and hungry student, and made good progress. To Frederick, this remarkable experience made Baltimore a sanctuary where new things were possible. One day it would be the springboard for his flight.
But that lay beyond a wide chasm of suffering and indignation. In 1833 his master of six years, Thomas Auld (who inherited Frederick from Aaron Anthony upon the latter’s death), brought the teenager back from Baltimore to St. Michaels on the eastern shore. Frederick was soon hired out to neighboring farms, one of which was owned by Edward Covey. Popularly known as a “slave-breaker,” a title bestowed on those who prided themselves on the persuasive power of their unyielding brutality, Covey was unsparing with the lash. From him, Frederick—now a large, muscular man—would learn to fight back: Daring to physically take on the “slave-breaker” in front of other slaves on the farm (the match went on for quite some time), Frederick humiliated the tyrant before his victims—a triumph destined to become one of the most celebrated moments in Douglass’s autobiography. Remarkably, he was no longer whipped on the Covey property. In 1835, Auld sent Frederick to work on the farm of William Freeland. There, having continued his self-educating and taken on a few clandestine pupils as well, Frederick would at last plan an escape attempt with several fellow laborers.
It ended disastrously. Betrayed, probably by a fellow slave, the party of conspirators were bound and hauled behind horses into St. Michaels. In the face of cries to lynch the men, Thomas Auld interceded, arguing that Frederick and the others be jailed for future trial (they hadn’t killed anyone, after all). It was a dramatic act by Auld on Frederick’s behalf, and not the last time that he would do such a thing. After lying to people that he was going to sell Frederick south to Alabama, Auld made a decision that would mark the turning point in his extraordinary slave’s life: He sent him back up to Baltimore to become a skilled laborer.
The intention was to turn Frederick into a profitable worker who could be hired out at a decent profit. But what happened was rather different. Taken on by Hugh Auld, Thomas’s brother, Frederick did indeed become a caulker in the shipbuilding trade. But he did some other things, too—like meet a free Negro woman named Anna Murray. By 1838, they had decided to marry and make a home for themselves in Baltimore. Hugh Auld, unusually liberal with the strictures he placed on his brother’s slave, had gradually allowed Frederick to become as close to free as a man in bondage could be. Such liberties went to Frederick’s head one day when he decided, on his own authority, to stay at an African Methodist Episcopal camp meeting outside Baltimore a little longer than Auld had anticipated. When Frederick came back, a furious Auld began stripping Frederick of the privileges he had begun to take for granted—including living apart from his master’s household. With his dream of marriage and a home of his own with Anna suddenly threatened, Frederick decided on escape.
The fruit of three tense weeks of planning and preparation, his flight from slavery was made possible by a remarkable acquisition: the papers of a free seaman, identifying him as a sailor. Whether sold or given as a gift has never been divulged. But they identified their carrier as a member of a very respected class of men in the ports of the eastern seaboard, a fact that more than compensated for the fact that the description of the bearer did not resemble Frederick Bailey at all. Armed with a false identity and a lot of very real courage, the runaway soon found himself—via train, then ferry across the Susquehanna, and train again—in New York City. Anna followed as soon as he could write to her, and they were married in September 1838. By the end of the month, with help from agents on the Underground Railroad (for slave catchers lurked everywhere), the happy couple was in New Bedford, Massachusetts.
Making his break with the past complete, Frederick Bailey became Frederick Douglass. Now his labor would be putting money in his own pocket instead of someone else’s. (It would not be caulking, however, as white men in his new home would not build ships with him.) And, soon enough, so would his speaking. Eloquent, passionate, charismatic, and extremely intelligent, this self-taught, self-made intellectual—who, were he unlucky enough to bump into the wrong men, would instantly be whisked off to a life sentence of soul-destroying labor under some scouring, deep Southern sun—began acting on a natural gift for stirring captivated audiences. Douglass turned the curse of his birth into an account of struggle to enlighten and shock abolitionists keen on acquiring firsthand knowledge of the netherworld they were fighting to destroy. And it worked. By 1842, having attracted the admiration of William Lloyd Garrison and other abolitionist leaders for his enrapturing speeches, he was making a living as an anti-slavery orator, logging thousands of miles to make uniquely powerful contributions to the debate that was increasingly tearing the nation apart—and, in light of the angry crowds, threatened to tear him apart as well. His autobiography—Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave—appeared in 1845, dropping him into the peculiar predicament of becoming an even bigger target for slave catchers who looked at his book as a giant “bring it on” sign. Because of this, as well as the opportunity to take his message to foreign audiences who wanted to hear him, he was off to the British Isles.
Threatened and cheered by turns across the Atlantic, Douglass had become an international celebrity, standing like a lightning rod for the age’s cause célèbre. Once back in America, his personal life and public views became inextricably intertwined in an ideological maelstrom that was as captivating to the public as it was representative of slavery’s capacity to confuse and enrage. In 1846, Hugh Auld, having already acquired “ownership” of the guy formerly known as Frederick Bailey from his brother Thomas Auld, manumitted his slave when British admirers of Douglass’s raised enough money—a little over seven hundred dollars—to purchase his freedom. Now a free man in both the North and the South, Douglass became shackled to the contentiousness that defined his life’s work. William Lloyd Garrison, the radical whose early sponsorship had been instrumental in Douglass’s rise, broke with the former slave in what became the defining philosophical clash of antebellum abolitionism. Garrison, uncompromising but extremely critical of violence, saw the struggle to end America’s peculiar institution as a sweeping revolution, denouncing political parties, religious institutions, and the Constitution itself as complicit—they were part of the problem, not a means of solving it. Douglass, by contrast, was willing to fight within the system, relying on political compromise if absolutely necessary. The break remained bitter and vituperative. Ultimately, John Brown attempted to woo the great orator to the side of violent force; he was staying at Douglass’s Rochester home when he hashed out the final details of his Harpers Ferry plan. In the wake of its sensational failure, Douglass once again hit the sea road a fugitive, fleeing the authorities that fingered him as part of the plot.
He returned from England in 1860 to a country on the verge of implosion. Lincoln’s election and its climactic aftermath settled much, bringing former ideological enemies together again. By the end of the following year the breech between Douglass and Garrison had all but disappeared, replaced in wartime by an urgent need to get Lincoln on board the abolitionist train. For Douglass, the defining issue became the administration’s refusal to put black men in uniform—a policy of unutterable stupidity as far as he was concerned, given the scale of the war, the stakes involved, and the eagerness of so many black men to sign up. “Why does the government reject the negro?” he asked rhetorically in one of his monthly publications. “Can he not wield a sword, fire a gun, march and countermarch, and obey orders like any other?”
When the government came around, largely due to partisans like Douglass, it inspired a bold career change. Since the 1840s, Douglass had been regularly publishing the North Star (renamed Frederick Douglass’s Papers and then Douglass’s Monthly), one of the leading abolitionist papers in the country. Though a celebrated speaker, he had defined himself primarily as an editor. Now he was to be a recruiter, throwing his efforts directly into the destruction of slavery—an endeavor made possible by the administration’s shift in policy. Douglass had two sons enlist in the famed 54th Massachusetts Regiment, traveled throughout the North to inspire enthusiasm for the war effort, and managed to secure a pass to recruit in occupied Southern territory. It was as if all the struggling, arguing, punching, and shouting of his prewar career had been leading up to this: a desperate and very lethal effort to change things once and forever. There was promise in the air.
Lincoln, once pilloried by Douglass as too soft on slavery, had become an ally. The relationship exemplified Douglass’s willingness to keep pounding away at solutions within the system, rather than destroying the system itself. Indeed, his initial meetings with the president were to protest the government’s awful treatment of black troops. Impressed by Lincoln’s candor and willingness to try new courses of action, Douglass decided to trust the Illinois “rail-splitter” and back his reelection. Lincoln himself greeted the great abolitionist at his second inaugural ball in March of 1865.
It was obvious to Douglass that Lincoln was a man he and his fellow freemen could work with. But they didn’t get Lincoln’s version of Reconstruction. Martyred for a cause he came to embrace only in the cauldron of war, Father Abraham left his flock in the lurch. Andrew Johnson was no replacement. Horrified by the new president’s sickly Reconstruction policy, Douglass devoted the rest of his life to two things: black freedom and the Republican Party (Johnson was a Democrat). Both would give him as much pain and trouble as they would satisfaction. The Fifteenth Amendment, for instance, forced him to make a difficult choice. Supporting a law that ensured the right to vote for every male American, regardless of race, meant ticking off many of his dear friends in the women’s movement who wanted to wait for an amendment that also included gender. To realize his dream of black enfranchisement, he broke with supporters of a cause—women’s rights—that he had warmly embraced for years. As for the Republicans, they were a political party. And like all parties, they were more than capable of misgovernment, corruption (lots of that), underhanded chicanery, and entrenched cronyism. Douglass seized on Grant as he had on Lincoln, believing him to be the man that prudence dictated should be the anointed champion of freemen. There was little Grant could do, however, that wouldn’t later be undone, especially in a two-term presidency that was saddled with scandal.
But for better or worse, politics had become Douglass’s main gig. In the ensuing years, he would rack up some impressive titles: U.S. marshal for Washington, D.C.; recorder of deeds for the District of Columbia; chargé d’affaires for Santo Domingo; minister resident and consul general to Haiti. But all of it was done against the background of Reconstruction’s grand failure—a gradual reemergence of the racialist order in the old Confederacy. Now ensconced in Anacostia, in the District of Columbia, he embarked on his twilight years. In 1894 he delivered his last major speech, “Lessons of the Hour,” against the evils of lynching then sweeping the South—a sad and telling indication of how things had come full circle for him and the causes he had fought for.
The following February 20, he attended a feminist rally in which he was greeted warmly by Susan B. Anthony. Later that night he collapsed and died. Douglass had been many, many things, from activist and politician to businessman, editor, and one of the towering voices of his century. Yet the identity that continued to define him for so many of his countrymen was the one he desired most to leave behind: the former slave who had become so much more than was expected of him. Not even Frederick Douglass could escape the realities of his age.
AULD LANG SYNE
Slave-master relationships were often strange, and those shared by Frederick Bailey with the Auld family were no exception. Thomas Auld and his wife, Lucretia, were observant enough to see something special in young Frederick and to send him up to Baltimore. Sophia Auld, Hugh’s wife, saw the same extraordinary sensitivity and took it upon herself to forever change his world by introducing him to the incredible power of words. And perhaps most importantly, Thomas Auld made the brave decision, after Frederick’s abortive escape attempt, to spare him from a life of hard labor in a Deep South that might well have broken him. Sent instead up to Baltimore without disciplinary action for an act that most of the white South considered deserving of a hellish punishment, Frederick was apprenticed to Hugh and taught a trade.
Nevertheless, the Aulds were still masters. Good, kind masters, but masters all the same, who could not summon the conscience, humanity, or imagination to understand why a young black man should have his freedom. Douglass justifiably hated them for this—and yet knew, at the very same time, that he owed much to them. As William S. McFeely writes in his biography of Douglass, “For his freedom—for his life—he would for the rest of that life be beholden to a white man whom he had loved and whom he now had to remember to loathe.”
The resulting storm of feelings would shape much of Douglass’s writing and thinking on the evils of slavery. It would also lead to one of his strangest compositions. Featured in the North Star in 1848, the tenth anniversary of his successful escape, Douglass’s letter “To My Old Master, Thomas Auld” sought to reconcile the author’s conflicting emotions on servitude, cruelty, forgiveness, and his own troubled past. Publicly and politely taking issue with Auld, it accused him of being the sort of abusive, tyrannical slave-driver that Douglass knew he wasn’t, perhaps in an attempt to create a focus for the rage that remained for having spent his first twenty years in bondage. Strangest of all, however, is the letter’s assertion that Auld had abandoned Frederick’s grandmother, Betsy Bailey, in her old age without having seen to her welfare. The accusation was false on two counts: first, Betsy had not been inherited by Thomas Auld, but by his brother-in-law; and second, she had in fact been brought back to St. Michaels to be cared for before she died.
Douglass would not know this for sure until 1877 when he found himself, for the first time in forty years, face-to-face with his former master once again. Thomas, very old and infirm, was able to correct Frederick on the point of his grandmother, and Douglass apologized. Despite this—and the fact that Douglass had excoriated Thomas Auld and his family in countless public speeches—the two men, choked with emotion, spoke like old friends and parted warmly.
JOB “SECURITY”
Frederick Douglass was a large, powerful man. And he needed to be. Taking on Edward Covey in his youth was just the first of innumerable physical confrontations that simply came with being one of those “uppity blacks.” In 1841, Douglass had the gall to choose his own seat on a train ride up to an abolitionist meeting in New Hampshire, and was promptly thrown off for refusing to sit in the “negro car.” Not long after this incident, he once again found himself confronted on a train by a conductor who had no intention of allowing Douglass’s black skin to ruin everyone else’s ride. Calling for help, the conductor and several buddies attempted to wrestle the recalcitrant passenger out of his seat, only to find that the iron grip he maintained on his bench made such an effort hopeless. Douglass arrived at his destination in that very seat.
Trains were a piece of cake compared to anti-slavery meetings. In 1843, Douglass and two white companions were in Indiana for an abolitionist meeting slated to be held in a local Baptist church. Unfortunately, the congregation was denied use of the building because of threats from local rowdies determined to break up the proceedings. The town did manage to provide an alternative meeting place in the woods, in which the anti-slavery group congregated the following morning. The toughs showed up once again and drew the meeting’s leaders into a debate that grew into a shouting match and then quickly degenerated into a brawl. Douglass grabbed a piece of wrecked podium to use as a club, but someone managed to break his hand before he got a chance to use it. One of his white companions, William White, was luckier: all he got was a deep gash across his head before they all ran for their lives.
Not that anti-slavery meetings were the only occasion for getting beat up. Consider the balmy spring evening in 1850 when Douglass, in his monstrous temerity, dared to stroll along the Battery in New York City with two British women friends of his. Imagine! To many New Yorkers at the time, this was the equivalent of … well, there really is no modern equivalent. They simply considered a black man bold enough to keep the company of white ladies really bad. Faced with such naked injustice, a group of onlookers dragged Douglass away from his screaming companions and kicked the crap out of him.
Then there are those anniversary meetings, which can be very dangerous indeed—when the anniversary being celebrated is that of John Brown’s execution. It was December 1860 in Boston, Massachusetts. Gathered in the Tremont Temple to observe the “martyrdom” of Brown were quite a number of anti-slavery folk. But they soon found that they were not numerous enough—for, as was bound to happen at these affairs, a horde of uninvited guests showed up. They were staunch pro-Union men who objected to abolitionism’s focus on a cause that was pouring fuel on sectional tensions and threatening the very cohesion of the nation itself. They soon took over the meeting and the podium through the Temple’s rules of order and elected their own representative to the chair. When Frederick Douglass rose to speak, he was grudgingly recognized, thrust himself head-first through a gang of antagonists on his way to the podium, and began what amounted to a shouting match with bigoted hecklers. One thing led to another until the podium erupted with violence, with spectators, speakers, and police all trying to sort the others out with whatever means necessary. At one point Douglass found himself wrestling for possession of a chair with more than a few opponents who finally resorted to yanking his hair and having the police throw him out of the hall.
That night, at an abolitionist meeting that would not be interrupted, Douglass spoke of war against the powers that allow slavery. He didn’t have long to wait.