The Freedmen’s Memorial (Emancipation Monument). Unveiled April 1876, Washington, DC. It stands today in the middle of Lincoln Park. Thomas Ball sculptor.
Genealogical trees do not flourish among slaves.
—FREDERICK DOUGLASS, 1855
Throughout the spring morning of April 14, 1876, a huge crowd, largely African American, began to assemble in the vicinity of Seventh and K Streets in Washington, DC. It had been eleven Aprils since the end of the Civil War, and eleven years to the day since the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. A parade involving nearly every African American organization in the city was about to step off at noon en route to the unveiling of an extraordinary monument to Lincoln.1 The city had witnessed many remarkable parades since the end of the war, but this one would be different.
The day was declared a public holiday in Washington, and flags above the Capitol as well as other government buildings flew at half-mast. At the head of the procession rode a contingent of twenty-seven mounted police, followed by three companies of black militia troops, headed by the Philharmonic Band of Georgetown. Numerous other cornet bands, marching drum corps, youth clubs in colorful uniforms, and fraternal orders from both Washington and Baltimore filled in the long line with pride and pomp. The Knights of St. Augustine carried a large banner with a painting of the martyred Lincoln. Horse-drawn carriages carried, among others, the black, Virginia freeborn professor, and dean of the Howard University law school, John Mercer Langston, who would perform as master of ceremonies, and the orator of the day, a newly arrived resident of Washington, the famed abolitionist and editor Frederick Douglass, who had grown up a slave across Chesapeake Bay on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.2 Langston and Douglass were soon to become open political and personal rivals, but on this day they joined in one of the most important public events of their lives.
The procession moved westward along K Street to Seventeenth Street, then south a few blocks and through the grounds of the Executive Mansion (the White House, which in those days was not walled off by security), and on to Pennsylvania Avenue. The parade traveled eastward directly toward the Capitol, turning briefly right on First Street West, then around the south Capitol grounds to First Street East, and finally on to East Capitol Street. For eleven more blocks the bands, marchers, and carriages passed throngs of people until they reached Eleventh Street, at the edge of fields and an emerging residential square. The setting was much better than on the Washington Mall, which at that time was swampy and unhealthy, used in places as a dump.3
A festive crowd awaited the parade, and a tall statue stood draped and concealed in flags and bunting. Next to the monument a stage and large speaker’s stand awaited a distinguished array of guests. President Ulysses S. Grant, now nearing the end of his second and final term in office, arrived before the parade reached the park and was accompanied by many US senators—including Oliver P. Morton, George Boutwell, John Sherman, and Blanche K. Bruce—members of the president’s cabinet, the justices of the US Supreme Court, many members of the House of Representatives, and a large contingent of other government officials as well as some former Union generals. Near the platform, the Marine Band struck up “Hail, Columbia” as the speakers walked from their carriages and the hundreds of marchers found their places in the vast audience.4
As the ceremony began, Bishop John M. Brown of the AME Church delivered an invocation, and J. Henri Burch of Louisiana read the Emancipation Proclamation. At the conclusion of the reading, the band played “La Marseillaise.” Langston introduced James E. Yeatman, a St. Louis banker and head of the Western Santitary Commission, the organization that had led the fund-raising among the former slaves and black Civil War veterans of Missouri and elsewhere in the country who provided the nearly $20,000 that paid for the monument. Yeatman explained how a former slave woman, Charlotte Scott, had donated the first $5, and how the commission had sought the American sculptor Thomas Ball, who resided in Italy, to conceive and create the statue.5
This remarkable monument, the Freedmen’s Memorial, as it became known, was many years in the making, the result of various designs and changes in purpose and meaning. In Yeatman’s lengthy remarks, he told of Ball’s “labor of love,” his “tribute to American patriotism” through the “gratitude of the freed people.” In a triumphal narrative, Yeatman described how Ball sent four photographs of his original model of a standing Lincoln and a kneeling slave to the Sanitary Commission, which in turn sent him a photograph of a former fugitive slave named Archer Alexander, whom the sculptor then depicted, with muscular torso, looking upward, his fist clenched, and in part breaking his own chains under the president’s guiding arm. Since Ball had been convinced by the commission and by the image of Alexander to alter his conception from a “kneeling slave . . . represented as perfectly passive” (freedom given), to an “emancipated slave [as] agent in his own deliverance” (freedom seized), Yeatman concluded that the monument was an “ideal group . . . converted into the literal truth of history.”6
The Freedmen’s Memorial (Emancipation Monument). Unveiled April 1876, Washington, DC. It stands today in the middle of Lincoln Park. Thomas Ball sculptor.
Such a ceremonial day in the spring sunshine, surrounded by the highest officials of the federal government, at a monument unveiling unlike any other that had occurred in America, was hardly an occasion for literal truth, whether in bronze or in words. But through all the pageantry would waft some powerful symbolic truths in unforgettable language. Langston stepped to the podium and asked President Grant to come forward to pull the cord and unveil the monument. As Grant stood still for a long moment, the entire crowd hushed in rapt silence. Not a good ceremonial speaker, the president delivered no remarks. As the flags and draperies fell away, the throng broke into loud applause and shouts, cannon were fired nearby in a field, and the band struck up “Hail to the Chief.” Those up close could see on the base of the monument the word EMANCIPATION, cut in large letters. Langston next read two congratulatory letters from people who had played roles in bringing about the monument. A poem, “Lincoln,” written by a young black Washington poet, Cordelia Ray, was recited. Then, as parts of the crowd had settled into chairs and others felt the spring breezes over their heads, Langston finally introduced Douglass, orator of the day.7
Along with Langston and many other black leaders, Douglass had strongly supported various efforts to build a major Lincoln and emancipation monument since at least September 1865. That month he had called for a humble memorial that “would express one of the holiest sentiments of the human heart.” His remark came in the immediate post–Civil War period when many white sponsors of such a Lincoln monument openly called on blacks to demonstrate “gratitude” for their liberation. Douglass had never been one to believe he had to prove his gratitude or dignity or even his acumen to whites generally. He had long understood that a national monument to Lincoln would be a major civic undertaking as well as a statement about the place of black people in America. From his own visceral experience as a slave and fugitive slave who plotted his own escape, he fully understood just how much freedom for black Americans was both seized and given. Douglass had long favored what he called a “people’s monument . . . without distinction of color,” a tribute that would reflect the story of interracial abolitionism that he believed had helped bring Lincoln to the Emancipation Proclamation, as well as to the new, potentially reimagined nation of 1865, devoted to a future of “common rights and common equality before the law.”8
But as Douglass rose to speak in April 1876 to finally dedicate such a monument, he, the recognized voice of black America, had prepared a speech of remarkable honesty, poignancy, and present-minded historical insight. “First things are always interesting,” he declared, “and this is one of our first things. It is the first time that, in this form and manner, we have sought to do honor to an American great man.” Douglass made it clear that he spoke, at least at first, only as an African American, for his race. The event was a first for a second reason that Douglass did not mention: black people had never before been represented on a national monument.9 In this charged atmosphere of artistic and political firsts, on the eve of the nation’s centennial and amid the deeply disturbing decline and violent overthrow of Reconstruction in the South, Douglass struck notes both majestic and somber. His speech assumed the tone of a requiem, tempered by modest celebration, restrained nationalism, and redemptive hope.
African Americans had tenuously arrived finally and openly in the center of the country’s highest affairs. Douglass made it clear that the unveiling of this monument to Lincoln and emancipation was a “national act,” performed by citizens in the place where “every pulsation of the national heart can be heard, felt, and reciprocated.” He insisted on an initial history lesson, referring to the “vast and wonderful change in our condition” (black freedom and citizenship). No such open commemoration by blacks in Washington would have been tolerated before the Civil War’s transformations, without opening “flood-gates of wrath and violence.” Douglass congratulated all, white and black, famous and ordinary, on this “contrast between then and now.” The orator conditioned his audience for the harder truths and starker metaphors to come by letting them feel the “long and dark history” of slavery as a matter of the past, replaced now by “liberty, progress, and enlightenment.”10
No African American speaker had ever faced this kind of captive audience, composed of all the leadership of the federal government in one place; and no such speaker would ever again until Barack Obama was inaugurated president in January 2009. Douglass, a master ironist about America, did not miss this moment of supreme symbolism. He named each contingent of every branch of the government sitting before him, including President Grant, Chief Justice Morrison Waite, senators and representatives, cabinet officials, all acknowledged as “wise and patriotic.” In this moment, the government was something sacred and enduring, newly remade from recent near destruction, the protector of a reconsecrated freedom for whites and blacks. The high officials may have smiled and felt their chests swell at the former slave’s patriotic language. Douglass struck chords of civil religion as he described the “stately pillars and majestic dome of the Capitol” and the District’s springtime surroundings as “our church.” In this new America, “all races, colors, and conditions of men” composed “our congregation.” “We the colored people,” proclaimed Douglass, “rejoicing in our blood-bought freedom,” now brought the same experience and sentiment, like all other Americans who lay in nearby Arlington Cemetery. “For the first time in the history of our people,” the orator proudly announced, “and in the history of the whole American people, we join in this high worship.”11
Then Douglass turned to the memory of Lincoln, and the speech assumed a different tone. While claiming a place for his people in honoring the martyred president, Douglass suddenly used words that may have shocked some in his audience: “It must be admitted, truth compels me to admit, even here in the presence of the monument we have erected to his memory, Abraham Lincoln was not . . . either our man or our model. In his interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought, and in his prejudices, he was a white man.” Douglass must have caused some squirming in the chairs as he injected race so forthrightly into his rhetorical tribute. Grant might have inwardly flinched. It was as though Douglass had decided to give voice to the kneeling slave on the statue, who would now say thank you as well as speak some bitter truths about a real history, and not merely allow the occasion to be one of proud, national self-congratulation. It was as though Douglass was saying—you gave me this unique platform today, and I will therefore teach these lessons about the jagged and tragic paths by which black people achieved freedom in the agony of war. “He [Lincoln] was preeminently the white man’s president,” Douglass continued in his forceful baritone, “entirely devoted to the welfare of the white man. He was ready and willing at any time during the first years of his administration to deny, postpone, and sacrifice the rights of humanity in the colored people to promote the welfare of the white people of the country.”12
Douglass employed a stunning level of directness for such a ceremonial occasion. He did not merely turn his moment in the national sun into a reminiscence about a good war and glorious outcomes. Lincoln’s growth to greatness and to the role of Emancipator, he insisted, must first be seen through the disappointments of his first year in office. Douglass would not consider the triumphal memory of 1865 without first pulling his audience through the pain of 1861. During the secession crisis and into 1862, he remembered, Lincoln had promised to support all constitutional protections of slavery in the Southern states. He “was willing to pursue, recapture, and send back the fugitive slave to his master,” a position Douglass had utterly condemned during the crisis. The former abolitionist forgot nothing of Lincoln’s record on race and slavery, especially the episode in 1862 when in a meeting with five black ministers at the White House, the president “strangely told us that we were to leave the land in which we were born,” or when “he told us he would save the Union with slavery” and “refused to retaliate our murder and torture as colored soldiers.”13 The litany of Lincoln’s sins against the cause of abolition was long and ugly, especially for this celebratory moment. But Douglass rejected empty politeness.
Then came the most striking and lasting words of the speech. “The race to which we belong were not the special objects of his [Lincoln’s] consideration,” Douglass declared to the ages. “My white fellow-citizens . . . you are the children of Abraham Lincoln. We are at best only his stepchildren; children by adoption, children by forces of circumstances and necessity.” But one of those stepchildren was lecturing the nation and its leaders on that April day. “To you,” he told whites in the audience, belonged the prime responsibility of honoring Lincoln. Then, he implored them to let the stepchildren have their place in the commemoration. “Despise not the humble offering we this day unveil,” he pleaded, “for while Abraham Lincoln saved for you a country, he delivered us from a bondage, according to Jefferson, one hour of which was worse than ages of the oppression your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose.”14
Although blacks’ faith in Lincoln, who had “tarried long in the mountain,” had been sorely tested, Douglass found a middle way, a historically balanced remembrance of Lincoln in this new moment of national trial. Through a “comprehensive view . . . in the stern logic of events, and in view of the divinity that shapes our ends,” he said, blacks, despite grief and bewilderment at the president’s slow actions, concluded “that the hour and the man of our redemption had somehow met in the person of Abraham Lincoln.” In Douglass’s analysis, historical circumstance had in the end made Lincoln the “head of a great movement.” Most important, Douglass used a refrain that formed the argument of his speech. “Under his rule,” he repeatedly declared, all manner of great change came about: slaves were lifted from bondage to self-aware liberty; black men exchanged rags for Union soldiers’ uniforms; two hundred thousand marched in the cause; the black republic of Haiti received recognition; the domestic slave trade was abolished and a slave trader hanged as a pirate and murderer; and the “Confederate States, based upon the idea that our race must be slaves . . . [was] battered to pieces and scattered to the four winds.” And “under his rule,” the “immortal paper,” the Emancipation Proclamation, emerged, “making slavery forever impossible in the United States.”15
Douglass had named the pain and betrayal of ages. Now he entered the celebration. He remembered poignantly his own special experience of Emancipation night, January 1, 1863, in Boston. He acknowledged that Lincoln had had to work toward emancipation against virulently racist opposition and therefore had to find the delicate method and timing for such a revolution. He recognized how deeply intertwined Union and emancipation had become, not least because of Lincoln’s brilliant political statesmanship. Hence, “viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him from the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.”16 As the mature political activist and writer, observer of world-historical transformations and betrayals, Douglass had learned much about both the burden and the uses of ambivalence.
In the rhetorical twists and turns of this complex speech, Douglass had one overriding target—the declension and betrayal of Reconstruction in the South by the federal government. “Under his rule and in due time” was Douglass’s way of saying not simply that Lincoln had personally saved and reimagined the Union, as well as liberated the slaves, but that the entire nation had done so and carried the burden of responsibility. That black freedom and the fate of the Civil War constitutional amendments—the civic lives and personal survival of the freedpeople—were on the line in the South at that very moment, and that Grant and the government had to be called to action, formed Douglass’s essential subject. But, it already seemed too late.
By 1876, a pivotal general election year and the nation’s centennial celebration, only three Southern states remained “unredeemed” by the white counterrevolution against Reconstruction. Each of them—Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida—had Republican-controlled regimes teetering on the brink of political extinction at the hands of terror, murder, and election fraud organized in the service of the Democratic Party and white supremacy. Indeed, the white South’s revival and takeover of its political fate, and the systematic destruction of black civil and political rights as well as economic independence, had left a cloud of despair over what remained of any Reconstruction policy by the Grant administration. Worst of all, the experiment in racial democracy born of emancipation and the remaking of the US Constitution—the dream come true in 1865 and the legacy Douglass had for more than ten years trumpeted as the long-term hope of his people—not only lay in tatters; it had been crushed by widespread, unpunished violence. Many hundreds murdered trying to vote or establish livelihoods, thousands more tortured or intimidated away from voting, and ballot boxes stuffed or stolen: this was the sorrowful state of American democracy in that spring of 1876.17 Each note of either cautionary woe or modest celebration in Douglass’s dedication speech at the monument with Lincoln standing majestically over the kneeling, subservient former slave needs to be considered through this story of the impending fateful defeat of Reconstruction. At one and the same time, the speech was Douglass’s careful statement of the great growth and change that Lincoln had presided over during the revolutionary war years and a lament over the apparent success of the counterrevolution against it.
As he concluded, Douglass gave his audience a thoroughly mythic Lincoln, a gift from freed slaves to the nation’s best sense of itself, despite all the terror emanating from the South. He brought the Illinoisan into the community of freedmen—the president had been “a man of work, a son of toil . . . the plebeian . . . honest boatman” whose “moral training” came from labor. On this anniversary of the assassination, Douglass culled that national nightmare for all its redemptive symbolism as well as power in the politics of memory. Lincoln’s murder, he declared, was not only the “hell-black . . . revenge” of Confederate agents, but “the crowning crime of slavery” itself. As Reconstruction fell to new hell-black actions by ex-Confederates, Douglass spoke to and for the black people who had planned and provided this event. This was a “good work for our race today,” he announced, “fastening ourselves to a name . . . immortal,” and “defending ourselves” against all who would “scourge us beyond the range of human brotherhood.”18 Douglass’s Freedmen’s Memorial Address was the tortured effort of a national stepchild to find the words that might still make the high and mighty of the United States hold the remaining lifeline to his people. It was an extraordinary “first thing” he dearly hoped would not be a last thing.
• • •
Douglass knew something of “toil” and “honest boatmen”; he was born a slave within yards of the Tuckahoe River on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. He traveled in a sloop out the Wye and Miles Rivers and up the Chesapeake Bay to Baltimore as a youth, and he crossed the Susquehanna and the Hudson in his epic escape from slavery. He knew something of rivers.
When the shad or herring were running, Betsy Bailey, Douglass’s grandmother, a master fisherwoman, would often spend half days waist deep in the beautiful, nearly one-hundred-yard-wide Tuckahoe, tending and pulling her seine nets. One of the greatest stories in American history began in February 1818 at the northwest corner of a horseshoe bend in the Tuckahoe, just above its muddy banks and layers of lush reeds, around a humble cabin managed by Betsy, a slave, and her husband, Isaac Bailey, a free man. Douglass lived most of his life believing that he had been born in 1817, but a handwritten inventory of slaves, kept by his owner at birth, Aaron Anthony, recorded “Frederick Augustus, son of Harriet, Feby. 1818.” He may have been born in the grandparents’ cabin, or in slave quarters near the tenant farmer’s house not far away where his mother likely lived, or even in a field nearby. The land and the extended families of slaves were part of the Holme Hill Farm, owned by Anthony, whom Douglass called “old master.” Anthony owned some thirty people and adjoining farms of six hundred acres in all, although he did not live at Holme Hill; he was the managing overseer of a much larger operation, the Wye plantation, some twelve miles to the west.19 By his brutal exercise of power, and possibly by blood, Anthony was, and still is, a crucial and mysterious figure in Douglass’s story.
Map of Talbot County, Maryland, with farm limits, by William H. Dilworth, 1858. It shows the Anthony farm on which Douglass was born at the horseshoe bend in the Tuckahoe River.
The district in which Douglass lived his first six years was known as Tuckahoe, in the northeast section of Talbot County, the whole of which was drained by the larger Choptank River as it meandered to Chesapeake Bay. Douglass later uncharitably described the area as “famine stricken” with a “worn-out, sandy, desert-like appearance of its soil.” But he could also remember with a somber nostalgia the “stillness of Tuckahoe,” and the “Kentucky Ravine,” as it was locally known, which provided a path down to the river’s edge. The nearest villages, and the first towns he ever saw, were Hillsboro just two miles upriver to the north of the Baileys’ cabin, and Denton, due east across the river in Caroline County, some five miles away. The boy enjoyed many hours of watching the commercial bustle and the great wheel around Lee’s Mill, just a mile north across fields of corn.20
Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was the son of Harriet Bailey, one of Betsy and Isaac’s five enslaved daughters. The second of the multiple names, most uncommon for a slave, can be attributed to his uncle Augustus, Harriet’s brother, who had died two years before the boy’s birth. Washington? Perhaps his mother, lonely and sexually abused, with so little to provide for her newborn, sought in a moment of anguished pride to link this child to the father of the country, rather than to a father he could never really know. Frederick only rarely saw his mother in the first years of his life; his tender and lyrical remembrances of her are almost pure invention. He never saw her at his grandmother’s cabin, but recollected a handful of nighttime visits from his mother after he was transferred to the large Wye plantation at age six. Born in 1792, Harriet gave birth to seven children between 1813 and 1825. Year after year, she was hired out to other farms, often as much as twelve miles away; but she sometimes walked the distances to visit her children at night and trekked dusty paths back to meet the overseer’s horn by morning. “My poor mother,” Douglass wrote, “like many other slave women, had many children, but NO FAMILY!”21
Douglass’s knowledge of his mother, he maintained, was “scanty, but very distinct. Her personal appearance and bearing are ineffaceably stamped upon my memory.” As time passed in his autobiographical quest, Douglass’s mother grew in stature, beauty, and influence. In 1845, he recollected that he had never seen her in daylight; but by 1855, she emerged from memory “tall and finely proportioned; of deep black glossy complexion; had regular features, and, among other slaves, was remarkably sedate in her manners.” What the cruelty of slavery had stolen from him, he seized back in his empowering imagination. Douglass found a picture of an Egyptian king, Ramses, in James Cowles Prichard’s Natural History of Man, “the features of which so resemble those of my mother, that I often recur to it with something of the feeling which I suppose others experience when looking upon the pictures of dear departed ones.”22 The mother he hardly knew became dignified, even regal, all but without gender, and one of many shields of protection he built around himself as a storyteller.
In a scene that became common in male slave narratives, Douglass told of the last time he saw his mother. In 1825 (perhaps February), not long after he had been taken to live with Anthony’s family at the Wye House, and under the stern, abusive rule of the cook, Aunt Katy, Douglass remembered a wonderful visit from Harriet Bailey—at least while it lasted. Frederick had greatly annoyed Aunt Katy one day, and she promised as punishment to “starve the life out of me.” When all the other children hanging around the kitchen received their warm corn bread, Katy purposely denied young Fred even a morsel. As he sat in a dark corner of the kitchen as the night wore on, hungry and stealing some Indian corn from a shelf, suddenly his mother appeared to save him. Harriet gave her boy a sweet ginger cake and “read Aunt Katy a lecture she never forgot.” The cake was in the “shape of a heart, with a rich, dark ring glazed upon the edge of it,” implying that it may have been Valentine’s Day around the Anthony farms. Douglass called this a pivotal scene in his early life and converted it into both stinging antislavery propaganda, and an unforgettable expression of the personal pain and loss at the heart of his childhood. “That night I learned the fact,” he remembered, “that I was not only a child, but somebody’s child. . . . I was victorious . . . for the moment; prouder on my mother’s knee than a king upon his throne.” But the moment was brief. He dropped off to blissful sleep; in the morning his mother had gone back to her field hand’s duty miles away. It was the last time he saw Harriet Bailey; she died sometime the next year in 1826, her illness and her grave unknown. Douglass implies that he was told of his mother’s illness as she deteriorated out at the Holme Hill farm, but “was not allowed to visit her.”23
As a world-famous abolitionist in 1855, Douglass knew well how this story would play on the emotions of his readers; but his words must also be read and interpreted as a child’s screams transported by memory into the anguished heart of a lifelong orphan. “The heartless and ghastly form of slavery rises between mother and child, even at the bed of death,” he offered to his sentimental readers. Then, he simply spoke for himself and millions of other former slaves, dead and living: “It has been a life-long, standing grief to me, that I knew so little of my mother; and that I was so early separated from her. The counsels of her love must have been beneficial to me. The side view of her face is imaged on my memory, and I take few steps in life, without feeling her presence; but the image is mute, and I have no striking words of her’s treasured up.” Douglass could see her only from a blurry side view, her voice muted, her very presence glimpsed from a picture of Egyptian majesty and physiognomy in a natural-history book. But he was not left silent. With great enthusiasm he said he later learned that his mother could read, and that she was the “only one of all the slaves and colored people in Tuckahoe” who could do so. Her “achievement . . . was very extraordinary,” he proudly declared, and for his own love of letters he credited the “native genius of my sable, unprotected, and uncultivated mother—who belonged to a race whose mental endowments it is . . . fashionable to hold in disparagement and contempt.”24 For such a great orator and writer to make this claim says at the very least a good deal about how dearly he yearned to know and understand his genealogical and temporal roots in the people and soil of Maryland’s Eastern Shore. It also may say that, even to Douglass himself, his extraordinary talent with language—his voice—remained something of a beautiful mystery.
The identity of his father was an equal, but hardly beautiful, mystery. This fact, Douglass wrote in 1855, “is shrouded in a mystery I have never been able to penetrate.” For the rest of his life he searched in vain for the name of his true father. In his 1845 Narrative, Douglass stated, “My father was a white man . . . admitted to be such by all I ever heard speak of my parentage.” Many in the neighborhood also “whispered that my master was my father; but of the correctness of this opinion I know nothing.” By 1855, his father was still definitely a “white man, or nearly white.” Now, however, Douglass said he was no longer giving credence to Aaron Anthony as his father; Douglass claimed that he had “reason to think he was not.” By the 1881 writing of Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, the author’s third autobiography, the paternity dilemma all but vanished with the simple statement “of my father I know nothing.”25 This was never the case for Douglass. The question was deeply important for him, and in 1855 he dwelled at great length on white fathers of slaves.
Indeed, he dwelled on Aaron Anthony. “I say nothing of father. . . . Slavery does away with fathers as it does away with families,” he wrote. “The order of civilization is reversed here.” Then he searched with intensity and descriptive detail for a sense of Anthony’s character as the first father figure in his life. Anthony was fifty-one years old when Frederick Bailey was born, and he owned the adult daughters of Betsy Bailey. But as yet we have no smoking-gun evidence that Anthony is Douglass’s natural father. Anthony had two surviving sons in 1818, Andrew and Richard, at ages twenty-one and eighteen; they are possible candidates, but with no evidence even of the hearsay variety that Douglass grew up with about the elder Anthony. Douglass carefully described the “old master” as essentially a cruel tyrant, capable of terrible physical and emotional violence, but a man victimized as much by the system of slavery as by his own nature, a theme Douglass repeated as a major part of his autobiographies. He also remembered occasional moments of distracted humanity in Anthony. Most of the time, Anthony paid little if any attention to the slave children around the Wye plantation yards; he was a busy overseer of the overseers, managing the economic and labor demands of a huge agricultural and commerical enterprise. But on at least one occasion, Douglass remembered Old Master’s “affectionate disposition . . . gently leading me by the hand—as he sometimes did—patting me on the head, speaking to me in soft, caressing tones, and calling me ‘his little Indian boy.’ ” Douglass used this “almost fatherly” act as background for a withering portrait of a smoldering volcano, a “brittle . . . unhappy man . . . of haggard aspect . . . muttering to himself” as he “stormed about . . . cursing and gesticulating” at his “invisible foes.”26
Born in 1767, Aaron Anthony was the seventh and final child of poor, illiterate farmers from the Tuckahoe Neck, the land immediately across the Tuckahoe River to the east in Caroline County. Douglass later described the poor whites such as Anthony who hailed from there as “the lowest order, indolent, and drunken to a proverb.” Like Frederick Bailey, Anthony was an orphan (both parents died when he was a child) who made his own way in the world and became a self-made man from extremely humble roots. He loved and managed money well. Like many Eastern Shoremen he also handled boats well, became a seaman, and a captain eventually of the most prominent schooner on Chesapeake Bay, owned and operated by Edward Lloyd. Almost always upwardly mobile, Captain Anthony, as he was often called, married up to Ann Catherine Skinner in 1797 and soon took up residence in a rent-free house on the Lloyds’ Wye plantation as head overseer of some thirteen farms, nearly ten thousand acres, and more than five hundred slaves. Since he owned Betsy Bailey, as a slaveholder Anthony likely did not need to buy more slaves of his own. Apart from the ten children Betsy herself bore, from 1799 to 1826, her five daughters gave birth to at least twenty more among them. By any measure, Anthony was a success story as the manager of the Lloyd slave empire and owner of three large farms of his own that he rented out, at least until after his wife died in 1818, the year Douglass was born. From then until his death in November 1826, Anthony may have descended into mental instability and increased sexual aggression.27
Douglass famously recorded an incident that gives credence to this image of Anthony as old and angry, lecherous and violent. Shortly after arriving at the Wye House at age six and joining the swarm of slave children there, Douglass was asleep early one morning in his normal place, “the floor of a rough closet, which opened into the kitchen.” He was awakened by the “shrieks and piteous cries” of his fifteen-year-old aunt Hester. Anthony had dragged her into the kitchen at dawn, made her strip to the waist, forced her to stand on a bench on her toes as her wrists were tied to a wooden joist above her head. Old master stood behind Hester, her neck, shoulders, and back “entirely naked,” an ugly cowskin switch (the lash) in his hand, shouting “d__d b__h” and other “epithets . . . too coarse and blasphemous” for readers to bear. Little Frederick looked on in horror through “cracks” in the boards as Anthony adjusted the whip in his hand, steadied his feet for leverage, and dealt one overhand blow after another to the young woman’s bleeding neck and shoulder blades. The blood dripped on her clothes and down to the floor; the old man clenched his teeth, gripped the cowskin, and delivered his “torture,” seemingly “delighted with the scene.”28
Embedded in Douglass’s rendering of this scene is his broader discussion of Anthony’s motives for such a beating. Hester had been seeing a young slave teenager, Ned Roberts (also fifteen years old), and Douglass describes both of them as beautiful and attractive young people, falling in love. Hester had rejected Anthony’s advances and paid dearly for it on that morning. Anthony, Douglass reported, wanted to “break up the growing intimacy” of the young lovers, but his efforts were to no avail. Douglass turned this episode of his childhood into a parable about the sexual corruption and the spirit-killing immorality at the center of the master-slave relationship. Hester lived with the “curse” of her “personal beauty,” and Ned with his almost powerless desire to court and marry her. The jealous Anthony’s intentions were “abhorrent” in every sense, his “methods . . . foolish.” What slavery so lacked in sexual and familial relations, Douglass offered, was a sense of normalcy, of the peace in which to love freely. Hester should have been free to give her affections to the handsome young man she liked, and Ned free to become a husband. But “who or what,” asked Douglass the autobiographer, “was this old master?” His answer? A tyrant with no bounds, a torturer, a man any civilized society would try and convict for his “awful criminality.” But alas, Anthony, exhausted from the whipping, wiping off the “blood-clotted cowskin,” ushered the mangled and weeping Hester out of the kitchen, not knowing that a little boy crouched in a closet peering in terror at the blood on the floor.29 Douglass’s crafting of the beating of his beautiful young aunt is a former slave’s recitation of an overwhelmingly vivid, traumatic memory of a morning in a slave boy’s terrible education. It took him many years to understand and find the language for the rage that old master’s whip and Hester’s blood had left in him.
If Anthony had been his father, Douglass dearly wanted to know the truth. But more important, he put him to use as a symbol, the sexual predator in the evil system that ruined all decency in humanity. Unforgivingly, Douglass made Anthony into the father of fathers among slaveholders. He turned that haunting whisper of his youth (“master is your father”) into a condemnation of the sexual abuse, and its spawn of hundreds of thousands of mulatto children, at the heart of slavery in America. The pain of not knowing with certainty the identity of his own father paled, he implied, next to the collective reality he witnessed. The slave status of a child was always that of the mother under American slave law. “This arrangement,” Douglass declared, “admits of the greatest license to brutal slaveholders, and their profligate sons, brothers, relations and friends, and gives to the pleasure of sin, the additional attraction of profit. A whole volume might be written on this single feature of slavery, as I have observed it.”30
Douglass experienced lasting individual trauma over his roots in this world of rural, lonely, familial, and violent sexual anguish. Few Americans ever more publicly and vividly remade themselves over and over quite like Douglass, and few had deeper reasons to try. Slavery meant to make him a “brute,” Douglass wrote. “But what man has made, man can un-make.”31
If indeed his twenty-year-old mother, still full of flowering beauty, youthful charm, and intelligence, had been raped by the power-besotted, sexually deranged fifty-year-old Anthony, Douglass had to find some story, or analysis, in which to comprehend it as he grew to adulthood. By retrieving his story from memory, he also had to try to dissolve it as he also created it. If he understood that he had not been conceived in love, then he could never know a father’s love, although he would seek alternative fathers for much of his life. “A man who will enslave his own blood,” he insisted, “may not be safely relied on for magnanimity. Men do not love those who remind them of their sins—unless they have a mind to repent—and the mulatto child’s face is a standing accusation against him who is master and father to the child.” Douglass wrote about his paternity with an acute and strategic sense of fatherlessness. Anthony, or whichever white man pursued Harriet Bailey into her quarters, or in the back of a kitchen in the dark, produced ultimately an angry Frederick Douglass, who would find the words to fight back. The extent of slavery’s sexual assault on the idea of family, Douglass wryly claimed, was beyond the “design of my simple story.” Hardly. So much racial mixture had emerged from American slavery, Douglass argued, that “if the lineal descendants of Ham are only to be enslaved, according to the scriptures, slavery in this country will soon become an unscriptural institution; for thousands are ushered into the world annually, who—like myself—owe their existence to white fathers, and, most frequently, to their masters, and masters’ sons.” Douglass knew this element of his story was old, complex, and, to most, salacious. He told it about as explicitly as he could. “The thoughtful,” he said, “know the rest.”32
In his abolitionist writings and his oratory, Douglass seldom missed an opportunity to convert his story into ways of defining slavery itself to his uninformed audiences. The orphan’s anguished story of his roots in Tuckahoe, the parents unknown or vanished, provided the perfect chance to tear out his reader’s heart as he bared his own: “There is not beneath the sky an enemy to filial affection so destructive as slavery. It had made my brothers and sisters strangers to me; it converted my mother who bore me into a myth; it shrouded my father in mystery, and left me without an intelligible beginning in the world.”33
But in such cries in the night, he did tell us a good deal of what remained intelligible in his furtive memory. The “first things” Douglass did actually know and experience were boyhood memories of life at his grandmother’s cabin, the trek to the Wye plantation (the “great house farm”), and his half-naked, half-starved time as a seven- and eight-year-old at Wye, scrounging for morsels of food and affection wherever he could find them. Even deeper, it was from in and around Grandma Betsy’s “log hut . . . built of clay, wood, and straw” that Douglass, the adult writer, conjured his first memories. His memory flowed with images of the grandmother’s majestic presence, her “freshly-ironed bandana,” how “esteemed” she was on both sides of the Tuckahoe for her skills in planting and preserving “seedling sweet potatoes.” As symbol and reality, Douglass gave us the first great yams in African American literature. Betsy perfected the art of placing the root of the potato at just the right depth and position so it would endure the winter’s frosts, a talent for which she was recruited all over the region to assist others, slave and free. Among Douglass’s first things was the well outside the cabin, where all the children (too many to count and almost all his cousins) would play, compete, and scheme. And then there was the simple, if magical, ladder inside the cabin. For Fred Bailey, the ladder up to a makeshift loft was one of those childhood objects or images that zipped in and out of his memory, “a really high invention, and possessed of a sort of charm.”34
Eating his quick meals of cornmeal with an oyster shell, dashing to and fro and always craving his grandmother’s attentions with deep seriousness against the bids of all the other urchins in the yard, and prancing across a cornfield to the busy mill up toward Hillsboro—these memories allowed Douglass to create a self-portrait of a boy in a state of nature. “Slave children are children,” he instructed his romantic readers. In his earliest years, he could imagine, he had been a “genuine boy,” running wild at times, “enacting, by turns, all the strange antics and freaks of horses, dogs, pigs, and barn-door fowls” without “incurring reproach.” This little boy, protected by the seemingly powerful matriarch at that bend in the Tuckahoe, could “trot on . . . as happy as any little heathen under the palm trees of Africa.”35
Or so the story demanded in his brilliant re-creation of childhood innocence peculiar to slavery, just before the fall, when befuddling rumors of old master’s absolute power began to invade his euphoria. “Clouds and shadows” began to descend on him; he was told that Captain Anthony brought all the slave children at a certain age to his own homestead. Soon, Douglass kept hearing around Grandma Bailey’s sanctuary, he would “see sights by and by.”36