The American Experiment

by David M. Rubenstein

  They invited Douglass out to Nantucket in August 1841 for an abolition convention. It’s the first speech he ever gave to white people, and he tells us that he quaked in his shoes. What they basically asked him to do was “tell your story.” And he did. He told it three times in a day and a half.

  He was immediately hired by the Garrisonian abolitionists in Boston. They launched him that fall, 1841, as an itinerant abolitionist orator, all over New England at first, and then all across the North. By 1842, he was becoming the star of the abolitionist circuit. He’s twenty-three, twenty-four years old.

  DR: At that point, he decides to go for a couple of years to England and Ireland. Why?

  DB: He writes that first autobiography [Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave] in the winter of 1844–45. That first autobiography is basically Douglass summing up, putting into story form, all the stories he’s been telling out on the circuit.

  It was explosively successful. He had already planned to go to the British Isles under the auspices of the Garrisonian abolitionists. They funded the trip, primarily. He also took boxes full of this book. He couldn’t keep it in print. He had a second and third edition published in Dublin, Ireland.

  That Narrative will sell thirty thousand copies in the first five years. That’s good today. If you can sell thirty thousand, you’re doing fine.

  DR: I thought one of the reasons he went was because the publicity he was getting for his autobiography made him fear his slave owner would come try to get him.

  DB: His abolitionist friends were, in some ways, I think, more concerned than he was. He is a fugitive slave, still. He can be captured at any time, and returned to slavery, by law. In fact, he spent nine years as a fugitive slave.

  So he goes first to Ireland, spends four months. Then into Scotland. He loved Ireland, although he arrived there right at the beginning of the famine. He said he saw poverty there, starvation, much, much worse than he’d ever seen in southern slavery, although he would not let the Irish abolitionists say that they were enslaved to the British worse than African Americans were enslaved in America.

  In Scotland, he arrives during a classic Scottish ecclesiastical war. The Church of Scotland is at war with itself over money that had been raised in the American South [from proslavery supporters]. It was perfect for Douglass. His favorite speech in his first three years out on the circuit was a speech he came to call the “slaveholder sermon.” Douglass was a great mimic. He was a performer. He would get up on a stage and he would start mimicking a slaveholding preacher: “Slaves be loyal to your masters,” as the Bible instructs in one instance.

  But he arrives in Scotland and they’re having a war over religious hypocrisy, his favorite subject. By the time he leaves Scotland, six months later, they’re writing poems and children’s songs about him.

  DR: Why is his name Frederick Douglass?

  DB: When he and Anna arrived in New Bedford—this is when they escape out of New York—they spend the night with the Johnsons. The next morning, Mr. Johnson, who is himself a former fugitive slave, says, “You’ve got to change your name.” Mr. Johnson had just read Sir Walter Scott’s epic poem The Lady of the Lake. Scott was really popular in those days. And Johnson said, “There’s a great heroic character in that story. His name is Douglas. It’s a powerful name.”

  That’s how he became Frederick Douglass, but he added an s. The Douglas in the Scott poem has only one s.

  DR: How does he become free and stop being a fugitive slave?

  DB: A group of British abolitionists, led by two sisters up in Newcastle upon Tyne, raised the money, did the correspondence with Thomas Auld back in Maryland, and arranged for the purchase of Douglass’s life.

  DR: For how much?

  DB: Seven hundred and sixty-six dollars. It was £150 in British sterling.

  DR: Eventually he comes back to the United States. Why does he move to Rochester? Not that it’s not a great place to be.

  DB: It’s a great place if you want to be an abolitionist. Rochester was out at the end of the Erie Canal. It was a big, booming town, known to be an antislavery enclave, and Douglass didn’t know about the winters there yet, I guess. He moved his whole family—his wife and now five children—out to Rochester.

  His British friends who purchased his freedom also sent him back to America with about $2,000, serious money then, to launch this newspaper called the North Star. It will be the longest-lasting Black antislavery newspaper of the nineteenth century.

  DR: He’s also going around the country making speeches. Is he well received everywhere?

  DB: Yes and no. He’s a big ticket on the abolitionist circuit, but he’s also a target. It was one of the ways he made a living, but we shouldn’t romanticize this. He was lucky if he got $50 for a speech in those years. Later on, after the Civil War, he’ll get $100, $150 a pop.

  But the newspaper nearly died every year. It just wasn’t well funded. He had between four hundred and seven hundred subscribers. That’s not a lot of people, although with a newspaper like that in the 1840s, one person might get it but show it to six neighbors.

  DR: So he can barely make a living doing this. He had a white woman helping him raise money and do some of the editing. Wasn’t that controversial?

  DB: Yes. Her name was Julia Griffiths, one of the most important friends Douglass ever made. She was British. He met her in England. One Douglass biographer years ago said it was love at first sight. We don’t know that, especially for him.

  Julia Griffiths was a brilliant woman. She was about three years older than Douglass, came from an abolitionist family in England. Extremely well educated, but there was no career open to her.

  She helped raise a lot of money for him, and she came over to the U.S. in 1849 with her sister. Her sister married Douglass’s printer, and Julia moved into the Douglass home in Rochester, which Anna Douglass ran.

  Anna was a thoroughly talented domestic woman, famous for her garden, famous for her cooking, for her rectitude, and for being a temperance woman. Julia lived in Rochester with them for six years, 1849 to ’55, crucial years in Douglass’s life. She became his assistant editor on this newspaper. She was his principal fund raiser. She was a very close personal confidant. And she helped him with his writing. He needed an editor. It blew up in controversy.

  DR: There was another woman from Europe who also became very close to him. What happened to her?

  DB: Julia went back to England in 1855, right after the publication of Douglass’s second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, which is his long-form masterpiece. A German woman named Ottilie Assing had been living in the States for about three years. She was a journalist, a German Jew, although a ferocious atheist. She came to the U.S. to cover the American abolition movement.

  She took the train out to Rochester, New York, basically knocked on Douglass’s door in 1856. For the next twenty-two years, they had a friendship-relationship on and off, which included the very complicated problem of Ottilie Assing coming many summers to Rochester and living for as much as three months in the Douglass home with the family.

  The problem, though, is that 99 percent of what we know about it comes exclusively from Ottilie Assing in the two-hundred-some-odd letters that she wrote to her sister in Europe, all of which I had translated. Every letter he wrote to her, and he did write her a lot, was destroyed.

  DR: So, as Princess Diana said, there were three in that marriage.

  DB: The exact nature of that Assing relationship was my second biggest problem in this book, but I treat it seriously.

  DR: John Brown is an abolitionist, interested in military insurrection. What is his relationship with Frederick Douglass?

  DR: Douglass was fascinated with John Brown from the day he met him, this steely-eyed, radical, biblical, Old Testament abolitionist who wanted to find some way to cause whatever breakup he could in the slave system, if not the whole country. A fellow radical abolitionist.

  John Brown had
this idea that he was going to create manned forts in the lower part of the northern states, and they were going to funnel slaves out of the upper South to these forts and then further north, and thereby damage the slave system. Not a very reasonable plan. But Douglass was interested.

  You have to understand what happened in the 1850s. The United States tore itself to pieces. The political parties tore themselves to pieces, the union tore itself apart. From the Compromise of 1850 all the way to secession, abolitionists got more and more desperate, especially after the Dred Scott decision [by the Supreme Court].

  Because if you were Black in America the day after that decision, you lived in the land of the Dred Scott decision, which said, “You have no future here.” So, when Brown was talking about some kind of insurrectionary strike on the South, Douglass listened. However, by 1858, when he learned that Brown’s real scheme was to attack Harpers Ferry, the largest federal arsenal, Douglass said, “This is suicidal, this is crazy.”

  DR: John Brown does attack Harpers Ferry, he’s captured, ultimately executed. Why does Frederick Douglass flee the United States? He wasn’t involved.

  DB: He wasn’t at Harpers Ferry, but unfortunately, in this big trunk of material the government found that John Brown left behind were lots of letters from Frederick Douglass. He was, in a sense, not only complicit, he was easily a coconspirator. He knew where this was going to happen. He didn’t know exactly when. Right after the raid, he was in Philadelphia giving a speech, and he had to escape for his life back to Rochester.

  DR: Let’s go forward to 1860. Abraham Lincoln is running for president, nominated by the Republican Party. Was Douglass in favor of Lincoln?

  DB: Yes and no, depending on which week you asked him. In the 1850s Douglass becomes a thoroughgoing political abolitionist. But he just was never sure how to own up to this new Republican Party. He cheered the fact that they opposed the expansion of slavery, but he always wanted them to go further.

  In the first year and a half of the war, Lincoln had no more ferocious critic among abolitionists than Douglass because of the policy of returning fugitive slaves, if possible, to the Confederates, and because the war was quite explicitly not being prosecuted against slavery.

  Lincoln had good reasons for this, let’s make no mistake. But in 1861, Douglass called Lincoln the most powerful slave-catcher in the land. Douglass will not really change his tune on Lincoln until the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.

  DR: That’s issued in preliminary form in September of 1862, and in final form on January 1, 1863, including the provision, in effect, that Blacks could serve in the Union Army.

  DB: In fact, it ordered it.

  DR: When Lincoln was president, he met with Douglass on three occasions. What was the nature of those meetings?

  DB: The first meeting was Douglass just going to Washington in August 1863 without an invitation. They’d been recruiting Black soldiers since January ’63, but it came to be obvious that Black soldiers were serving with terrible discrimination, unequal pay, inferior equipment, brutalization, never allowed to be officers with commissions.

  Douglass had recruited a hundred members of the famous Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Regiment. But he quit recruiting in July of ’63, and he went to Washington. First time he’d ever set foot in Washington, D.C. He went to the White House. He just got in line.

  You’ve probably heard the famous story of the lines that would form at Lincoln’s White House. People would wait and try to see the president, and the poor man would sit there and meet them all.

  Douglass got in line, and he was admitted to the president’s office. He spent probably forty-five minutes that first meeting with Lincoln, and he protested these discriminations against Black troops. Douglass left that first meeting with no promises, but he did come away from it awed by Lincoln. In speeches he said that he’d never been in the presence of a powerful white man who treated him so fairly.

  DR: Second meeting, he wasn’t treated as well.

  DB: The second time is August of ’64. Lincoln is up for reelection, but it doesn’t look like he’s going to be reelected. The war is in hopeless stalemate in Virginia, in Georgia, and a lot of other places.

  Lincoln invites Frederick Douglass to the White House. He needs the greatest Black spokesman in America. He looks Douglass in the eye and asks him to be the principal agent of a scheme—think back to John Brown now—that would funnel as many slaves as possible out of the upper South, to behind Union lines, into some kind of legal freedom before Election Day.

  Douglass had no idea what he was supposed to do. All Lincoln told him was, “The War Department will help you.” He went back to Rochester, he started firing telegrams and letters off to his friends, telling them about this scheme, even though he had no clear idea what they were supposed to do.

  But he was saved by history, because within two weeks was the fall of Atlanta. Douglass never had to put that team together.

  DR: Douglass sees him the final time after Lincoln’s inaugurated a second time. Lincoln is assassinated not too long thereafter. Ultimately the Thirteenth Amendment is passed. Slavery is over. Is Douglass’s mission in life gone?

  DB: For a while he thought it was. In his third autobiography [Life and Times of Frederick Douglass], the chapter about the end of the war is called “Vast Changes.” He opens with a paragraph—classic Douglass, if he wasn’t quoting the Old Testament, he was always quoting Shakespeare—he opens with a paragraph in which he says, “Othello’s occupation is gone.” That comes out of a soliloquy where Othello is lamenting the loss of his army, his horses. But Douglass really probably was worried that “they don’t need me anymore.”

  DR: He does have a meeting with Andrew Johnson. How did that go?

  DB: It was the worst meeting between an African American delegation and an American president ever held. It’s in February 1866, during the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, which is holding hearings on what to do about Reconstruction in the South. The Republicans have called a halt to Andrew Johnson’s attempts to reconstruct states.

  Douglass had no invitation. He went to the White House with a delegation of twelve other Black leaders. One was his son. Johnson preached at them for forty-five minutes. He told them their presence in this land was the cause of this war. He said, “You will never have any kind of civil and political liberty and equality in this country.” Then, as they were leaving, Johnson was overheard [saying]—Douglass heard him say it—“That Douglass is just like every other N-word I’ve ever seen. He will sooner cut your throat than not.”

  But Douglass was Douglass. He took this delegation back to a hotel here in the District. They issued a press release. They told the world what had just happened. It was splashed in the papers the next day.

  Then he went to his desk, and he wrote a whole new speech, “The Perils to the Republic.” And he took it on the road, during the midterm elections of 1866, all over the North, and he skewered Andrew Johnson.

  DR: Ultimately, he moves from Rochester because his house is burned down. Where does he move?

  DB: He moves right behind the Capitol on F Street. He then bought Cedar Hill, land up in Anacostia, in 1878 with a big loan from a good friend, Robert Purvis.

  DR: He gets an appointment as U.S. marshal for the District of Columbia. Was that the first time a Black person had ever been confirmed by the United States Senate?

  DB: Indeed it was. In 1877 Rutherford Hayes appoints Douglass marshal of the District, which was like being a glorified sheriff of the District of Columbia. It was an important federal post, much more important than you might think, because in the Black press, all over the country, this was hugely celebrated. It also had a salary—the first salary he ever made in his life.

  DR: Does he believe in nepotism at this job?

  DB: He makes eight appointments as clerks in the marshal’s office. The first four are his four adult children. There were nine or ten D.C. newspapers then, three of them Black, five of them white. Everyb
ody is charging him with nepotism. Finally he goes and meets the press one day and says, “Okay, it’s nepotism. My kids need jobs.”

  DR: His wife of forty-four years dies. Does he remarry?

  DB: Anna died in 1882, after long illness. They had four surviving adult children, twenty-one grandchildren. By the 1880s, there were always a variety of other hangers-on around Douglass. All of them are financially dependent on him for lots of reasons. It’s one of the most complicated aspects of Douglass’s life.

  Anna dies in the summer of ’82 and Douglass has an emotional breakdown. He went up to Poland Spring, Maine. He spends two months there by himself, and he writes some priceless letters to his daughter—priceless because of how he opens up about the nature of his life, how he opens up a little about Anna.

  Douglass, in his 1,200 pages of autobiography, never says anything, or almost anything, about his family. There’s one mention of Anna in 1,200 pages.

  Fourteen months after Anna died, he married Helen Pitts. A woman twenty years younger. A white woman. It became the most scandalous marriage of the nineteenth century.

  DR: What does he say about it?

  DB: He says it’s nobody’s business, even though everybody made it their business.

  DR: One of his parents was white.

  DB: He would joke about it. Douglass became brilliant at converting racism into humor when he had to. What do you do with the absurdity of racism sometimes but find some way to laugh at it if you can? Otherwise you’d go crazy. He said, “In my first marriage I honored my mother. In my second marriage I honored my father.”

  Most importantly, Helen was a very well-educated woman, a Mount Holyoke graduate. Came from a staunch abolitionist family in western New York.

  DR: Douglass was at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, and he was a big believer in women having the right to vote. Except when the Fifteenth Amendment came around, he had to choose: Do you want to let women and Blacks vote, or just Blacks? Why did he say he didn’t want women to be in the Fifteenth Amendment?

  DB: He wasn’t the one who said women shouldn’t be in the Fifteenth Amendment. That was done for him by Congress. Everyone with one eye open knew that if you put women’s suffrage in the Fifteenth Amendment, it never passes.