Turbulent Times
FREDERICK DOUGLASS
This proves I am impartial. My first wife was the color of my mother and the second, the color of my father.
—Frederick Douglass
After pulling off a daring escape from slavery, Frederick Douglass championed abolition and women’s rights, counseled presidents, and penned three autobiographies. He long courted controversy with his choice of female companions and shocked the nation when he crossed the racial divide and married a white woman in 1884.
Betrayed by a fellow slave, eighteen-year-old Frederick Douglass landed in jail after his first attempt to escape lifelong bondage failed in 1836. He successfully tried again two years later, this time with behind-the-scenes help from his fiancée, Anna Murray, a domestic servant and free black woman five years his senior. Traveling with a train ticket she purchased and disguised as a seaman in clothing she sewed for him, the runaway slave slipped away from the port city of Baltimore and traveled north to freedom.
The future abolitionist had been separated from his mother, a slave, as an infant, and the only fact he knew for certain about his father is that he was white. Raised on a plantation until he was seven, Douglass was then sent to a Baltimore family to look after their young son, a move that dramatically changed the direction of his life.
The mistress of the house unknowingly started Douglass on the path to greatness by taking the extraordinary step of teaching him to read and write, until her husband put an end to the lessons. Determined to become the master of his own fate, Douglass continued his self-education and honed his oratory skills at the East Baltimore Mental Improvement Society. His literacy gained him admission to the group, whose members were primarily free black men and women.
After arriving safely in New York City, Douglass sent word to Anna to join him. They married immediately, the bride donning a plum-colored silk dress and the groom a suit he had stashed in his decoy sailor’s bag. The newlyweds headed to the coastal town of New Bedford, Massachusetts, a safer destination than Manhattan, where slave catchers were out in full force, looking to cash in on rewards offered for runaways. Having shed his given surname, Bailey, to help evade capture, the fugitive chose the moniker Douglass, inspired by a character in Sir Walter Scott’s poem The Lady of the Lake.
Douglass found work as a day laborer and, for the first time in his life, pocketed the money he earned. “Though we toiled hard the first winter, we never lived more happily,” he recalls in My Bondage and My Freedom. Within three years of fleeing Baltimore, Douglass found his calling as a speaker and champion of the abolitionist cause, gaining employment with the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society.
A gifted orator, Douglass traversed the Northeast delivering powerful speeches to mostly white audiences, who heard for the first time a personal account of what it was like to be a slave. At the same time, his rising fame and constant traveling began to take a toll on his marriage. The reserved and politically unambitious Anna, unable to read or write and never fully comfortable in white society, seldom accompanied her husband to public events. Douglass hired a tutor for her, to no avail, and she remained almost totally illiterate throughout her life.
Not long after the birth of the couple’s third child, Douglass sailed alone for Europe. He undertook the journey partly to drum up backing for abolitionism and partly to avoid capture after the publication of his inaugural autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. The gutsy book all but painted a bull’s-eye on his back. During the nearly two years her husband was abroad, strong, resourceful Anna kept the home fires burning. She raised their kids, supplemented the family income by making shoes, and donated time and money to the abolitionist cause.
When Douglass returned stateside, his life had changed immeasurably. He was now a free man, thanks to overseas supporters who raised enough money to purchase his emancipation from his Maryland owner. While abroad, Douglass was also introduced to British abolitionist Julia Griffiths, an encounter that would have serious consequences for him.
Julia joined Douglass in Rochester, New York, where he had moved his family, to help publish his antislavery newspaper, the North Star.. She turned around the paper’s dire financial situation and, along with offering editorial assistance, coordinated Douglass’s lecture schedule. She and her sister Eliza moved into the Douglass family home and often accompanied him to antislavery society gatherings and speaking engagements. Julia and the abolitionist were close companions, even strolling arm in arm through the streets of Rochester, a startling sight in the 1850s. On one occasion, Douglass was attacked and beaten while in public with the Griffiths.
The unconventional relationship between a white woman and a black man was grist for the rumor mill, especially after Eliza married and was no longer the ostensible chaperone for her sister and Douglass. Even other abolitionists pleaded with the high-profile figure to end his association with Julia, believing the scandal undermined the cause and offered ammunition to their opponents. Despite a more tolerant attitude in the North, those who wanted to abolish slavery were usually not in favor of interracial intimacies. Douglass held firm to his conviction that his friendships could transcend color lines, although Julia did move out of his house and eventually returned to England.
Shortly after her departure, another white woman entered the picture. Yet again Anna was expected to share her husband, and occasionally her home, with a rival: German journalist Ottilie Assing, who turned up on the family’s doorstep with an agenda. A correspondent for a prestigious newspaper in her home country, she wanted to interview the famed abolitionist for an article. Their initial meeting turned into a professional and personal association that lasted for twenty-eight years.
After relocating to the United States and reading Douglass’s second memoir, My Bondage and My Freedom, Ottilie learned more about the abolitionist movement and made it her mission to educate the German public about the evils of slavery in America. Not only did she see herself as a freethinking crusader like Douglass, she believed that her minority heritage as a half-Jewish German made her an excellent match for him. To her, he was the embodiment of a romantic hero. In the introduction to the German edition of My Bondage and My Freedom,, which she translated and helped to get published, she lauds his bravery and eloquence—and rather obviously highlights his good looks, mentioning his “beautifully carved lips” and other pleasing features.
Ottilie kept an apartment in Hoboken, New Jersey, where Douglass was a frequent visitor, and like Julia Griffiths before her, she often accompanied him on lecture tours. She offered him advice on political matters, helped write his speeches, and introduced him to prominent people she knew. In the years before and after the Civil War, the two writers often aligned their editorial messages about slavery—Douglass in his newspaper and Ottilie in the pieces she wrote for overseas publications.
For nearly twenty years, Ottilie spent summers as a guest in the Douglass home. She insinuated herself into the household, spinning entertaining tales for his children and accompanying Douglass on the piano while he played the violin. While Anna tended to household matters, Ottilie and Douglass conversed and read aloud to each other in the garden. Anna was understandably aloof toward the interloper and no doubt resentful at being treated like a servant—which Ottilie had mistaken her for the first time she visited the Douglass residence.
The love-struck German journalist aspired to more than just a working collaboration with the abolitionist and had designs on becoming the next Mrs. Douglass. She was often contemptuous of Anna, whom she and Douglass secretly referred to by the derisive nickname “border state,” a reference to the region that separated slavery from freedom.
Douglass seemed aware of, but largely indifferent to, the pain that his friendship with Ottilie caused his wife. Not long after he took up with the reporter, he confided to a friend that Anna wasn’t well. She suffered from various physical maladies, including neuralgia, and Douglass acknowledged that his behavior only made things worse. Still, he didn’t change his ways and once flippantly reported that, despite her ailments, Anna was “able to use with great ease and fluency her powers of speech” in order to inform him of the many areas in “need of improvement in my temper and disposition as a husband and father.”
While no definitive proof exists that Douglass and Ottilie ever slept together, she alluded to a physical and emotional attachment between them. Long into their friendship, she confided to her sister, “If one stands in so intimate a relationship with a man as I do with Douglass, one comes to know facets of the whole world, men and women, which would otherwise remain closed to one.”
Two decades after Anna aided Douglass in his escape from slavery, Ottilie had a chance to help him out in a life-threatening situation. After abolitionist John Brown staged a failed raid on a federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, intending to arm slaves for an insurrection, it came to light that Douglass had known about the plot. A warrant was issued for his arrest, and friends spirited him out of Philadelphia, where he had been giving a speech. Once he made it to Ottilie’s apartment in Hoboken, she sent coded telegrams on his behalf and got him to an out-of-the-way train station so he could travel home unnoticed.
Douglass fled the country and again sought refuge in Europe. He lectured in England and Scotland and visited friends, among them Julia Griffiths and her husband. Ottilie planned to rendezvous with Douglass in France, fulfilling a dream of touring the Continent together. But the sudden death of his youngest child, ten-year-old Annie, sent him back to the States. Three weeks after returning to Rochester, where he kept a low profile to evade the authorities until the charges were dropped, he stunned and upset his family by inviting Ottilie to join them while they were in the midst of mourning.
Ottilie’s desire to become the next Mrs. Douglass remained unabated. She continued to meet up with him in Rochester and then followed him to Washington, D.C., where by presidential appointment he became the first African American U.S. marshal. Ottilie’s emotional demands on him continued to grow and so did her bitterness when he showed interest in another woman. As her mental state unraveled, he began distancing himself from his longtime companion.
In 1881, Ottilie and Douglass spent four days together before she set sail for Europe to wrap up her late sister’s estate. It was the last time they saw each other. Anna passed away the next summer, freeing them to marry, but no word came from Douglass initiating a reunion. Instead, he was busy romancing someone else.
Less than a year and a half after Anna’s death, Douglass astounded his family and the public by secretly wedding Helen Pitts, a white woman twenty years his junior. The couple’s romance had heated up after Douglass hired the vivacious, well-educated, and politically minded Pitts to work as a clerk in his Washington, D.C., office.
Seven months after Douglass’s nuptials, an elegantly dressed Ottilie left a Paris hotel and headed to a park. She took a seat on a secluded bench and then swallowed potassium cyanide from a vial tucked in her handbag. Prior to her death, Ottilie told friends she had been diagnosed with cancer, although the widely held belief is that her suicide was prompted by Douglass’s actions. Curiously, she never amended her will, leaving him a sizeable trust fund.
Around the time Ottilie committed suicide, Douglass and Helen were enjoying a belated honeymoon trip through Canada and New England. On returning home, the groom reported to a friend that, remarkably, he and his wife encountered “not a single repulse or insult in all the journey.”
This was a pleasant surprise after the firestorm of controversy they had weathered at the time of their nuptials in 1884. His children were kept in the dark about the romance and heard the news from a reporter after Douglass applied for a marriage license. Resentful that he was replacing their mother with a white woman, they encouraged his grandchildren to give Helen the silent treatment. Furthermore, they believed their father’s choice signified his rejection of their black heritage—a sentiment also held across the country by others who felt betrayed by the abolitionist leader. One newspaper correspondent didn’t mince words, saying, “Goodbye, black blood in that family. We have no further use for him.”
Helen’s father, a longtime antislavery advocate, refused to allow his son-in-law into his home and disowned his daughter. Her sisters and nieces remained firmly in her camp, as did her mother, who as a widow went to live with the Douglasses. Another supporter of the headline-making marriage was suffragette leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who heartily congratulated the groom and wished him happiness with his new bride.
No doubt aware that becoming Douglass’s wife would garner societal and possibly familial censure, Helen forged ahead with her decision anyway. She later expressed, eloquently and courageously, a simple reason for proceeding with the nuptials. “Love came to me,” she said, “and I was not afraid to marry the man I loved because of his color.”
MR. NOT SO NICE GUY: RICHARD WRIGHT