FREDERICK DOUGLASS
1818?-1895
There was no more important African American public figure in the nineteenth century than Frederick Douglass. Born into slavery, he could easily have remained illiterate his whole life. But with extraordinary ingenuity and perseverance, he taught himself to read, and soon turned himself into such an electrifying antislavery speaker and writer that some audiences simply could not believe that he had grown up a slave. Even skeptics found themselves won over by his charismatic personality, acerbic wit, and skillful arguments. Douglass’s eloquence became a powerful weapon in the war against slavery, as he edited an influential abolitionist newspaper, stirred crowded lecture halls in the United States, Great Britain, and Ireland, and published his best-selling Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845).
LIFE
Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was born in Talbot County in the slave state of Maryland sometime around 1818. He barely knew his mother, a slave, and never knew the identity of his father, probably a white man and perhaps his owner. At first he lived in his grandmother’s cabin, and then at the age of six he went to live in the house of his owner, the chief overseer of a vast plantation belonging to one of the wealthiest men in Maryland. It was during this period, as Douglass recounts in horrifying detail in his autobiography, that he first witnessed the daily cruelty suffered by plantation slaves.
An important turning point came in 1826 when Frederick was sent to live with Hugh and Sophia Auld, relatives of his owner in Baltimore. One of the most famous episodes in the autobiography tells of the moment when Hugh Auld discovered that his wife was teaching the slave to read. He burst out angrily that literacy would make Frederick “discontented” and “unmanageable” and so “would forever unfit him to be a slave.” This reprimand transformed the slave’s life: “From that moment,” Douglass writes, “I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.” In the seven years that he remained with the Aulds, Douglass used his best resources to learn how to read and write, discovering two texts that would significantly shape his later career: Caleb Bingham’s The Columbian Orator (1807), and the speeches of Thomas Sheridan, an eighteenth-century Irish actor and educator. Both were guides to public speaking.
In 1833 Hugh Auld’s brother, Thomas, who had become Frederick Bailey’s official owner, called him back to work on his plantation. Thomas Auld was a cruel master, but he found the slave so unruly that he sent him to a harsh “slave breaker” for a year to tame him. Douglass was not tamed, however; he defied and bested this notoriously brutal master in a long physical struggle, which, he says, resolved him to break free from slavery altogether: “however long I might remain a slave in form, the day passed forever when I could be a slave in fact.”
After a first abortive attempt at escape, Douglass returned to Hugh Auld in Baltimore, where he learned caulking skills in the shipyard and began to turn his weekly wages over to his master. During this period of relative independence he met and fell in love with a free black woman named Anna Murray. Then, in 1838, he managed a successful escape. In the Narrative he was reluctant to divulge his strategies in case publicizing them would endanger other slaves trying to escape, but much later, after slavery had ended, he told the full story. First he disguised himself as a sailor and borrowed the identification papers of a free black seaman; then he traveled by train and ferry to New York, and with the help of abolitionists, moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts. There he married Murray, changed his name, and worked odd jobs to make a living. He also began to read an abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator. In 1841 he met its celebrated and controversial editor, William Lloyd Garrison, who invited Douglass to work for him as a traveling lecturer, telling the story of his life and selling subscriptions to the newspaper.
This marked the beginning of Douglass’s extraordinarily successful public career. From the outset, his lectures moved his audiences to laughter, tears, and rapt attention. “As a speaker, he has few equals,” claimed a contemporary editor. “I would give twenty thousand dollars if I could deliver an address in that manner,” said another. In a context where apologists for slavery argued that Southern slaves were contentedliving comfortable lives with kindly ownersDouglass’s story offered a compelling counternarrative. And yet, from the beginning, he was also accused of fabricating the facts. His oratorical elegance and skill were so striking that a few abolitionists pleaded with him to put a little more “plantation” into his speech, so that he would seem more authentic. Douglass refused.
The public lectures paved the way for the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass in two ways. First, although Douglass’s speeches regularly told of the cruelties of slaveholding, mocked hypocritical proslavery ministers, and asked Northern audiences to confront inequality and prejudice in the free states, the centerpiece of his lectures was his own life story. He had tested it out on audience after audience; he knew it had power, and he was eager to disseminate it widely. Second, given the many accusations of fraud against Douglass, he wanted to publish details about the people and places he had known as a slave, so that others could confirm the truthfulness of his account. But publishing the details also put Douglass in danger. There was always the threat that a fugitive slave would be recaptured and sent back to the South, and now his owners could recognize him from his narrative and come to claim him. Douglass left the United States for England in 1845, just a few months after the autobiography appeared.
For two years Douglass traveled through Great Britain and Ireland, lecturing to enthusiastic crowds. By 1848 the Narrative had gone through nine editions in England alone, and it was translated into French and German. Douglass was surprised at the relative lack of racial prejudice he encountered in Britain. Among the warmest receptions he had was from Daniel O’Connell, the leader of the struggle against British colonial rule in Ireland. In England two Quakers gave Douglass the money to buy his own freedom, and in December of 1846 he became officially a free man.
Back in the United States, Douglass broke from Garrison’s organization. Garrison was a powerful voice in the antislavery cause, but he paid Douglass less than the white lecturers on his circuit and patronized him, urging him to focus only on telling the story of his own life because, Garrison suggested, a black man was not capable of analyzing slavery as a large-scale social problem. Garrison also refused to fight for the vote for African Americans. Setting up on his own, Douglass launched an antislavery newspaper called the North Star in Rochester, New York. This city was an important stop on the underground railroadthe secret route organized around safe houses which fugitive slaves followed to Canada. The Douglass household harbored so many runaway slaves that there were sometimes as many as eleven fugitives staying in the house at a time. But the city was less committed to full racial equality than the Douglasses had hoped: their oldest daughter, Rosetta, was not allowed to attend public school, and the private school she attended forbade her to learn with the white students. Douglass began a campaign to end segregation in the schools. In 1848 he attended the women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, and he emerged as a stalwart champion of women’s suffrage. The motto of the North Star marked his commitment to gender as well as racial equality: “Right is of no sex,” it read. “Truth is of no color.”
When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Douglass led efforts to persuade Congress and President Lincoln to allow African American men to enlist in the Union Army. This struggle succeeded, and in 1863, Douglass actively recruited soldiers to fight, including his own two sons, Lewis and Charles. After the war was over, he led the campaign for black suffrage, and prevailed in 1870 with the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which states that citizens cannot be denied the vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
The following years saw Douglass working tirelessly to expose and denounce discrimination and violence. He moved to Washington, DC, where he held several government offices. In 1889 he accepted the position of consul-general to Haiti and moved there, but later resigned when he was told that he was too sympathetic to Haitian interests. His wife died in 1882, and Douglass later married Helen Pitts, a white woman. After speaking at the National Council of Women, he died of a heart attack in 1895. On hearing the news of Douglass’s death, the women’s rights activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton remembered hearing him speak for the first time: “He stood there like an African prince, majestic in his wrath, as with wit, satire, and indignation he graphically described the bitterness of slavery. . . . Thus it was that I first saw Frederick Douglass, and wondered that any mortal man should have ever tried to subjugate a being with such talents, intensified with the love of liberty.”
SLAVERY AND ABOLITION
In the southern United States in the nineteenth century, slaves worked in fields, in homes, and in mines; they built railroads and canals; they processed sugar and iron. But by far the most significant use of slave labor involved cotton production. Eli Whitney’s 1793 invention of the cotton gin had accelerated the cleaning of cotton, and worldwide demand for cotton textilesa source of cheap and lightweight clothinghad skyrocketed. But this was a crop that still needed to be handpicked in the fields. The booming cotton trade therefore demanded lots of arable land and a huge supply of laborconditions met easily by the slave economy of the United States South. Nearly three quarters of all US slaves labored on cotton plantations, and by 1840 the southern United States produced more than half of the world’s cotton. Cotton helped to drive the whole nation’s economy, contributing substantially to the growth of Northern industry, shipping, and banking. It powered the global economy too. African traders used the term americani to refer to inexpensive cottons from the United States. And even after Britain had officially abolished slavery in its own territories, British traders imported vast quantities of cotton picked by US slaves, and British mills turned this raw material into textiles for sale around the world. About 10 percent of Britain’s wealth came from the cotton trade. In 1858 US Senator James Hammond of South Carolina declared, “You dare not make war upon cotton. No power on earth dare make war upon it. Cotton is king!”
Intent on reaping as much profit as possible from their crops, plantation holders increasingly turned to the “gang system” to organize slave labor. Groups of slaves, under the command of an overseer, were forcedtypically with whips, clubs, and threatsto perform a single repetitive task from the break of dawn until night. To increase efficiency, slaveholders would often rotate corn and cottonready at different times of the yearand use the corn to feed both slaves and animals on the plantation.
The state of Maryland, where Douglass was a slave, differed from most of the South. Maryland farms mostly grew tobacco rather than cotton, and the demand for tobacco was on the decline. Also, by the time that Frederick Douglass was born, Maryland had the highest number of free black men and women in the United States, more than half of its African American population. (By contrast, more than 99 percent of black people in Alabama, Texas, and Mississipi were slaves.) Working in the bustling city of Baltimore, surrounded by free blacks, Douglass had significantly more opportunities for escape than the plantation would have afforded.
Maryland was reputed to have a less harsh and dehumanizing slaveholder population than the “deep” South. In this respect as in many others, Douglass’s Narrative challenged his readers’ assumptions. In general the abolitionists felt that the best weapon against slavery was a campaign to reveal its horrors as fully and as accurately as possible. They went to significant trouble to demonstrate the evils of slavery and to confirm the truth of their claims. Some former slaves on the lecture circuit corroborated their accounts of violence by baring scars on their backs to horrified audiences.
Apart from organizing lecture tours and publishing books, abolitionists also sent volleys of pamphlets by mail to Southern states. But Southerners were not the only targets. As the abolitionist movement grew in the 1830s, activists increasingly focused their attention on the indifference of white Northerners, who mostly kept quiet on the subject of slavery. Neither major political party would mention it. And even in the North, angry mobs would descend on antislavery meetings and smash their printing presses. Douglass himself had his hand broken in Indiana. Dedicating themselves to exposing slavery to a wide public, abolitionists showed just how riskyand how powerfulwords could be.
WORK
While the truthfulness of Douglass’s story was a central question for his contemporaries, recent readers have been more inclined to admire the literary artfulness of the Narrative, its metaphorical richness, rhetorical complexity, and careful construction. Douglass casts his life as a long process of self-transformationfrom an object, or an animal, to a free human being with a name. The contrast between the openings of the Narrative and of Rousseau’s Confessions is instructive. Rousseau begins by proclaiming that he differs from everyone else in his unique personality and character. Douglass, on the other hand, starts by reporting what he does not know of himself. He must guess his own age, he doesn’t know his birthday, he has only rumor to tell him of his father’s identity. Although he knows his mother, he spends virtually no time with her; she comes to him and leaves him in the dark. Most children develop their sense of who they are by precisely the clues missing in Douglass’s experience: age, parentage, and such ritual occasions as birthdays. Douglass has only a generic identity: slave. Everything in Douglass’s early experience denies his individuality and declares his lack of particularized identity. By the end, however, he claims a right to affirm himself: “I subscribe myself, FREDERICK DOUGLASS.” The name itself is a triumph, not his father’s or his mother’s but the freshly bestowed name of his freedom. Each step of the way to this pointlearning to read, learning to write, acquiring a namehas involved a painful self-testing, but the word proves for Douglass quite literally a means to salvation.
If Douglass wins himself a name and an identity by the end of the Narrative, the triumphant individual is not the sole focus of the story. Along the way, Douglass uses his own experience to throw light on slavery in general. The first pages in fact tell us little about the uniqueness of the author, and Douglass is careful to explain how his own circumstances are common to many slaves. He also repeatedly argues that individuals emerge out of their circumstances. He goes to some trouble to show how masters systematically create the slaves’ mindset, deliberately starving them of intellectual or spiritual nourishment. But he makes it clear that the masters, too, are created by their conditions. Sophia Auld begins as a compassionate and generous person, but the experience of owning another human being makes her suspicious and mean-spirited. Many readers have seen the Narrative as fundamentally a story of self-transformation in which the illiterate and unthinking slave is prompted to recognize the injustice of his experience and to insist on his full personhood, but Douglass reminds us many times along the way that self-transformation always involves a set of opportunities, and that under slightly different conditions, this slave might never have sought out his freedom.
There is one way that Douglass’s story has disappointed recent readers. He affirms his own manhoodrejecting the bestial and objectified status of the slavebut does so at the expense of women’s experience. He entirely omits descriptions of important women in his life, such as his grandmother, who raised him, and his wife-to-be. He does give graphic depictions of women slaves enduring physical violence, and he refers to the rape of slaves by masters more than once. But since his central image for slavery is a physical struggle for dominance between men, and since he depicts women mostly as lacerated bodies, Douglass’s Narrative cannot be said to speak for all slaves.
In recounting the internal and external shifts that take him from slave to free man, Douglass’s story draws on a number of other genres. As in spiritual autobiographies, the Narrative calls attention to moments of revelation, when the central figure undergoes a kind of conversion experience, and sees himself and his world in a fresh light. As in rags-to-riches stories, Douglass tells us how he makes a dramatic rise in social status and wealth through virtues such as perseverance, bravery, self-reliance, and determination. He draws on the sentimental novel, too, in offering us images of innocent victims whose abuses tug at our heartstrings. And the Narrative draws on the language of politics, economics, and religious sermons, woven together throughout the text. But perhaps most important, this autobiography belongs in the tradition of the slave narrative, which, by Douglass’s time, had become a well-established genre. There had been thousands of first-person accounts of slavery published since the late eighteenth century, and slave narratives had become a major American genre. They were so popular that most American readers might never have encountered an autobiography written by anyone other than a slave. Among these many narratives, Douglass’s has been widely recognized as the richest, most subtle, and most beautifully conceived, remaining worthwhile reading not only for its searing indictment of slavery, but also for its complex literary artistry.
Questions:
FREDERICK DOUGLASS 1818? -1895
1. How did Frederick Douglass learn to read?
2. What was Douglass able to tell readers about his early childhood and what was never recorded?
3. How did Douglass eventually escape from slavery?
4. Describe skills Douglass possessed as a public speaker. What were some of the negative feedback that he received concerning his speeches?
5. In addition to his speeches, what other steps did the Douglass household take to fight slavery?
6. What role did Douglass want African Americans to take in the Civil War?
7. Why was slavery so extensive in the southern states of the United States?
8. What communities benefited financially from the slave labor used on southern plantations?
9. What are the strengths of the writing of Douglass (Narrative) that make it notable as world literature in addition to the historical message?
10. What aspects of the lives of women slaves are described by Douglass in Narrative? What descriptions of women are omitted?
