The whaling ship Eliza Adams in port with casks of whale oil, New Bedford, Massachusetts, c. 1850.
Yes, the world’s a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow.
—HERMAN MELVILLE, MOBY-DICK, 1851
Frederick Bailey had found his passage out, and Frederick Douglass now searched for a pulpit. By mid-September 1838, when Frederick and Anna arrived in New Bedford, Massachusetts, they had wrenchingly experienced what Douglass would later call the “upper-ground railroad,” and what the world came to call the Underground Railroad. They had escaped slave territory to free soil by their own remarkable bravery, but they had also benefited immensely from the clandestine efforts of David Ruggles and a small network of people to whom Ruggles had referred the newlyweds. Still trusting nearly no one, the anxious fugitives were now armed with at least one letter of introduction as well as other names. After taking the steamer to Newport, Rhode Island, Frederick and Anna rode a stage up the coast into Massachusetts and arrived exhausted and penniless in the whaling port.1
In New Bedford they were directed immediately to the home of the free blacks Nathan and Mary Johnson at 21 Seventh Street. The Johnsons took them into their three-story, wood-framed house for the night, paid their stage fare, and welcomed Frederick and Anna as they had many such fugitives before. Nathan Johnson’s origins are not fully known, but he had been involved in creating the growing black community in New Bedford, and in assisting fugitive slaves, since at least 1822. At breakfast on the morning after Frederick and Anna’s arrival, Johnson urged the Marylanders to choose a new name. Too many Johnsons resided among the fugitive slaves of New Bedford, as well as in the broader North, said Nathan. Indeed, of the twenty-three Johnsons listed as head of households in the New Bedford town directory for 1839, twelve were labeled c for “colored.” In his remembrances, Douglass gives no role to Anna in this decision. He tells us that he gave his host the privilege of choosing his new last name, but that he dearly wanted to retain Frederick. “I must hold on to that to preserve a sense of my identity,” wrote Douglass in 1845. Johnson had just been reading Sir Walter Scott’s Lady of the Lake, the classic and popular romantic Scottish poem of 1810. From the Highlander clan named Douglas, Johnson suggested a new name. Frederick liked the name’s sound and strength as a word, and he quickly accepted, adding an s for distinction.2 Thus began the long process of the most famous self-creation of an African American identity in American history.
In both its simplicity and its literary gravitas (Scott was wildly popular in America) Douglass wore his new name with increasing pride. Remembering this choice of new name in Bondage and Freedom, he referred to his two original middle names (Augustus Washington), given by his mother, as “pretentious.” As the literary historian Robert Stepto has remarked, Douglass’s sloughing off of his two middle names and the choice of the new surname provided him a kind of “ritual cleansing” of some of his slave “baggage” at this special moment in his new beginning. With retrospect, Douglass sighed that any fugitive slave had to adopt various names during his escape to survive because “among honest men an honest man may well be content with one name, but toward fugitives, Americans are not honest.” And by 1855, he had long since read Lady of the Lake and was glad to be associated with the “great Scottish chief,” although he acknowledged that his New Bedford benefactor, Nathan Johnson, might better represent the military “virtues” of Scott’s Highlander hero. “Had any slave-catcher entered his [Johnson’s] domicile,” wrote Douglass, “with a view to molest any one of his household, he would have shown himself like him of the ‘stalwart hand.’ ” This passage is really about Douglass himself, who had learned and practiced repeatedly by the mid-1850s the virtues and perils of protecting and transporting fugitive slaves. He does not tell us just how he incorporated his new name into his sense of self during his first years of relative obscurity in New Bedford. But with time he had clearly breathed some of Scott’s language into his soul. He wanted to be viewed by his many audiences “Till whispers rose among the throng, / That heart so free, and hand so strong, / Must to the Douglas blood belong.”3 Douglass eventually developed above all a literary identity, a man of words spoken and written.
The New Bedford in which Douglass landed in 1838 had a population of nearly twelve thousand, perhaps as many as three hundred of whom were fugitive slaves among a free black population approaching one thousand. It was as open and thriving a refuge for runaways as anywhere in the North. And it was a booming whaling center, with some 170 ships making it their main port and employing as many as four thousand hands. In the year just before Douglass arrived, the town had some seventeen candle houses and oil manufactories. Of the 181,724 barrels of sperm oil and 219,138 of whale oil imported into the United States in 1837, more than 40 percent of the totals came in at New Bedford’s docks. Within the ensuing decade down to 1849, whaling became the first international industry dominated by the United States, with New Bedford as its capital. By 1840, in New Bedford, with a population of 12,087, the whaling business grossed $7,230,000.4
Douglass himself would never go to sea as a whaler, although the crews of so many ill-fated ships were one place where blacks and Indians and all manner of young boys and men could find work. Like Baltimore, the sea at New Bedford brought the world into Douglass’s vision, and the whale as a product made an economy in which he would find wage labor of all kinds for three years. As Herman Melville put it in Moby-Dick, the crews with whom he served and fought and mutinied on whale ships came from “all the isles of the sea, and all the ends of the earth.” From his residence in New Bedford at the very time Douglass also lived there, Melville left unforgettable descriptions of the town. New Bedford, he wrote, “is a queer place,” full of an almost infinite eccentricity of types and behaviors among the young mates of the whale fishery, of a variety of “wild specimens” from the hills of New England and the farthest isles of distant oceans.5
In his own way, Douglass was another wild specimen come to join this teeming seaport, and now he needed a job. From his years in Baltimore, Douglass knew much of the world of ships, seaports, the maritime trades, and especially of the men and women who lived by the wealth of the sea. But the body of the whale had for several decades built New Bedford and forged jobs for a young fugitive slave. Until the discovery of petroleum in Pennsylvania in 1859, which rapidly killed off the whaling business, the whale helped launch the modern industrial revolution, its oil used for all manner of lighting, its hairy bristles made into brooms, its bones transformed into everything from canes to umbrellas, its pearly spermaceti made into the best candles, and even a foul black liquid from its gut somehow converted into perfume.6
Douglass’s autobiographical writing about New Bedford served different ends than Melville’s; it took its place in his antislavery polemic, drawing sharp distinctions between a Southern slave society and a Northern free-labor society. Yet, it was often no less lyrical than Melville’s descriptions of the town. Many have speculated, though no one knows, whether Melville and Douglass somehow met or observed each other in New Bedford; they were both there in late 1840 and early 1841. The sailor-adventurer was preparing for his long voyage to the South Seas on a whaler, while the fugitive slave worked as a day laborer. Douglass admitted that the “wealth and grandeur” of New Bedford surprised him. He had been conditioned to consider slavery as the basis of wealth. Not in the whaling port. Working white men and black men alike owned homes and lived with dignity. Douglass seemed genuinely stunned at Yankee enterprise and apparent prosperity. Contrasting the “poverty and degradation” of poor whites in Baltimore and St. Michaels with the “superior mental character” of Northern workers, he used as his example Nathan Johnson. Douglass’s host, though a workingman, lived in “a better house—dined at a richer board—was the owner of more books—the reader of more newspapers—was more conversant with the social and political condition of this nation and the world—than nine-tenths of all the slaveholders of Talbot County, Maryland.” Johnson, Douglass contended, labored with his hands in New Bedford, was the worker-citizen, even an intellectual in this seaside free-labor community.7
Douglass also remembered that he felt safe in New Bedford, in part because the town contained so many Quakers, with their egalitarian and enterprising traditions. During his residence in the town, whaling seemed to be a commerce with an endless future. At the wharves, he insisted, were “industry without bustle, labor without noise, and heavy toil without the whip.” For the young Douglass, all things before his eyes were in stark contrast to the slavery-ridden world from which he had fled. In the town’s many whale-related enterprises, he maintained, “everything went on as smoothly as the works of a well-adjusted machine.” The excited man in his early twenties was impressed with all the modern conveniences he encountered: “wood houses, indoor pumps, sinks, drains, self-shutting gates, washing machines, pounding barrels.” Such observations vary widely from Melville’s characterizations of the hard-drinking harpooners and other lost souls at the Spouter Inn and other stops along the streets of New Bedford. That “wise prudence” guided the sensibilities of this town would have seemed strange news to many of the young men seeking adventure and fortune on those whalers in the 1840s.8 But Douglass was aiming for different places.
Within three days of arrival in New Bedford, Frederick found paid work loading oil casks onto a sloop bound for New York. He soon sought to use his trade as a caulker, but the white caulkers of the docks threatened to walk off their jobs if the young black man was hired. All was not so prudent or liberating after all. But in this case Douglass swallowed his pride and anger, put away his caulking mallet for now, and took every kind of job he found. One day he walked up to a prosperous house, knocked on the door, and asked the lady if he might put away her load of coal. As she dropped two silver dollars in his hand at the end of his dirty work, Douglass remembered, it “swelled my heart as I clasped this money, realizing that I had no master . . . that my hands were my own.” For three years, and for “honest” money, he said, he “sawed wood—dug cellars—shoveled coal—swept chimneys . . . rolled oil casks to the wharves—helped to load and unload vessels—worked in Richetson’s candle works—in Richmond’s brass foundry, and elsewhere.” He also worked as a waiter for a prominent attorney, and did all manner of odd jobs for a local minister, Ephraim Peabody. A reminiscence later by a Peabody family member described how Douglass became a man-of-all-work at the minister’s house, though much more inclined, it is said, to sit on the kitchen table and read than to work with his hands. The Peabody descendant reported that Douglass defended his “inactivity by affirming that he occupied his leisure hours by pursuing the study of French.” At the foundry, Douglass characteristically tried to read while he did the hot and dirty job of working the bellows. “With little time for mental improvement,” he recalled in 1851, “I often nailed a newspaper to the post near my bellows, and read while I was performing my up and down motion of the heavy beam by which the bellows was inflated and discharged.” In old age he marveled that he could have been so earnest in pursuing knowledge as a young man, while having to struggle to feed his family.9
Anna gave birth to their daughter Rosetta on June 24, 1839, and their first son, Lewis, on October 9, 1840. Douglass does not tell us in the autobiographies about the circumstances or joys of these births; he only indicates how he worked with his callused hands to support his wife, “who was unable to work,” and a growing family in two rented rooms. They lived first at the rear of 157 Elm Street, on the west edge of the main town, and after Lewis was born at 111 Ray Street, only a few blocks from the wharves. Frustratingly, Douglass wrote next to nothing of his domestic life throughout his long experience as an autobiographer. In these three years in New Bedford, what we do know is that he found work and stayed out of debt. In “rapturous excitement” at working freely for wages, and gaining some independence, Douglass believed he “was now living in a new world.”10
Soon the day laborer looked for a church. Perhaps he was thinking of his children’s spiritual welfare, or even Anna’s lack of community. But as always, in the autobiographies, the story was only about himself. At this juncture of 1839–40, he admitted, he “had never given up, in reality, his religious faith.” He considered himself in a “backslidden state” in his early twenties. The young man was looking for a pulpit, one he could listen to, and perhaps one he could step into. Father Lawson’s faith still tugged at Douglass’s spirit, and the stories and cadences of the Bible slumbered fitfully in his memory. He had grown up around Methodists on the Eastern Shore, many of them the hypocritical masters he used as a foil for resistance. Out of familiarity, he felt a duty to try to join the Elm Street Methodist church. Douglass attended the primarily white church, but found himself “proscribed” and not allowed to sit in the main pews. A dozen or so blacks attended and sat in a gallery. Staying for Holy Communion, he witnessed the ritual with “mortification”; as the Reverend Bonney finished serving all the white members, he called the blacks forward with a “voice to an unnatural pitch.” His “black sheep,” said Douglass, seemed “penned . . . slavish souls.” Douglass walked out the back door of this humiliating scene.11
Douglass quickly found his way to the welcoming arms of the small black congregation of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, pastored first by the Reverend William Serrington and then by the Reverend Thomas James, who had himself been born a slave in 1804 in upstate New York. In 1839, Douglass served as “sexton, steward, class leader, clerk, and local preacher” in this humble congregation that met in a little schoolhouse on Second Street, only three blocks uphill from the wharves. He also performed weekly duties as the church’s Sunday school superintendent, responsible for the education of members. The Reverend James later claimed that Douglass, who was “right out of slavery,” had been “given authority to act as an exhorter” at the church just before James’s arrival. The reverend said he then licensed Douglass to preach, which Douglass later confirmed. Douglass remembered his deep associations with what he always called “Little Zion” as “precious,” and “among the happiest days of my life.” He expressed firm opinions on which of the church’s ministers were most effective or possessed education. He said he “occupied the pulpit,” when the minister asked, and dozens of times Douglass held forth on Sunday mornings or at evening gatherings. In a letter near the end of his life, written in December 1894, Douglass reminisced with joy about how the little AMEZ Church in New Bedford had offered his first chance to “exercise my gifts” and launched him in his “new vocation.” In the 1841 town directory, Douglass’s occupation had changed from “laborer” to “Rev.”12
No recorded remarks survive from Douglass’s sermons to the small church of fugitive slaves and free blacks. By at least the summer of 1840, though, earlier than scholars have previously known, Douglass was discovered by white abolitionists. In August of that year the Boston antislavery lawyer Ellis Gray Loring wrote to a friend in Toronto, the Reverend Hiram Wilson, excitedly telling of a “coloured man . . . we are anxious to employ as a lecturer.” His name was “Fred” and he had been owned by “Thomas Auld of Talbot County, Maryland.” This stunning young fugitive had escaped “two years ago”; he was a “light mulatto, tall, well-formed, of an open countenance & speaks very good English.” Loring enlisted Wilson to be an agent to Auld to try to buy Douglass’s freedom. “Fred is poor & a labourer,” Loring wrote, but his speaking skills could “produce great effect.”13
Nothing came of this early initiative to purchase Douglass’s freedom. But the day laborer did not hide from view, especially on Sundays. The young father with his wife at home caring for two babies must have frequently taken time in his workaday life to consult his Bible, his Columbian Orator, and his vivid memory of the band of brothers at the Freeland farm as he prepared for his mornings in the pulpit.
• • •
The former Sabbath school leader among slaves seized upon his liberty and his new calling like a miner finding gold. At least by 1840, and perhaps as early as 1839, he registered to vote by paying his $1.50 poll tax. In Massachusetts in the late 1830s, men, including blacks, registered to vote by paying this small annual tax. In the sweep of America’s racist and discriminatory history with voting rights, it is remarkable that the most famous black man of the nineteenth century, shortly after escaping from slavery, while living with a new, assumed name, with no other identification and certainly no proof of birth in the United States, and while still “illegal” as a fugitive from Southern justice and the property rights of his owner, could instantly become a voter by paying $1.50 and having his name placed on the tax rolls.14
Approximately four months after his arrival in New Bedford, Douglass also encountered an agent for William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper, the Liberator. The paper and its editor changed Douglass’s life forever. The young fugitive was too poor to pay for a subscription at first, but the agent nevertheless had the weekly sent to him. In the Liberator Douglass started reading an antislavery voice like no other. Garrison seemed prophetic, revelatory, like a “Moses, raised up by God, to deliver his modern Israel from bondage.” So clear, radical, and uncompromising, Garrison’s words seemed to Douglass like a “gospel . . . full of holy fire.” The paper, Douglass wrote in 1855, “took its place with me next to the Bible.” Here he found moral suasion, the appeal to reform the hearts of people before changing the laws of a society. For the young reader, so drawn to the mystery of writing and speaking, this was abolitionism through the power of language, words as weapons against evil and powerful institutions, truth spread by preaching.15 Here was a new level of public hope, reinforcing and containing the fires of anger burning in his private heart.
In those initial issues of the Liberator that Douglass read in 1839, he encountered an inspiring world of antislavery activity and debate. He discovered that abolitionism had spread all over the North. He learned a new word, immediatism, for Garrison’s theory that slaveholding was an individual and national sin, that all antislavery forces should make no compromise with slavery in any form—in church, legislature, or the public square—and should work now to destroy the institution, root and branch, in their own lifetimes. Douglass read about huge petition campaigns by abolitionists aimed at persuading the US Congress to end slavery in the District of Columbia and in the western territories. He now knew about “gag rules” practiced in Congress to suppress the voices of that body’s few antislavery members. He found colonization schemes to send blacks out of the country, to Africa or elsewhere, roundly condemned over and over by Garrisonians, and especially by free blacks. He saw Garrison himself condemned in correspondence as everything from “dangerous” and “vile” to “seditious,” and the leader of a “miscreant band . . . of demented fanatics.”16 All of this Douglass found thrilling; the waves of rhetorical and violent resistance to abolitionists seemed to the young fugitive one of their greatest recommendations.
Douglass further learned from the Liberator that women were involved in the movement, organizing fund-raising abolition “fairs,” recruiting new members, stepping out of their assigned sphere and inviting great scorn. In many issues Douglass found news of both escaped as well as captured fugitive slaves in Northern states. In every issue, he saw confirmations of one of his own most vehement complaints—hypocritical Christian slaveholding and Northern clerical complicity. By April, he might have been bemused as he read about the Baltimore Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church (with some of his Maryland tormentors perhaps in attendance) turning down an antislavery resolution by an almost unanimous vote. He likely laughed out loud when he read about the black man in Cambridge, Massachusetts, working for a white merchant who prodded him into a practical joke. The employer offered to fill out a ballot for his employee (who was illiterate) and carry it for him to a polling place. But the black laborer got the last laugh; on his own initiative, he walked to the office of the Liberator and asked for a ballot; given the current copy of the newspaper, he promptly marched to the polling site and stuffed Garrison’s weekly in the box.17
In some issues, Douglass could study the names and careers of a generation of black abolitionists. In April 1839 for the first time on paper he likely met James McCune Smith, with whom Douglass would develop a crucial friendship. Above all, Douglass must have fingered the words of Garrison himself, who so often all but shouted from the page. The “real abolitionists,” declared the editor in March 1839, “know neither caste, country, nor color. The cause of suffering humanity is not with them a political question, concerning only a certain class or community . . . it is their business, and it ought to be the business of every son and daughter of Adam.”18 To Douglass’s impressionable spirit and hungry mind, this was abolitionism clear and pure; he wanted to join up.
To Douglass, Garrison was a hero exciting “love and reverence” before the two ever met. Thus began, in almost mythic terms, one of the most important and turbulent relationships of Douglass’s long life. For Douglass, Garrison represented a moral voice—from a white person—against slavery, the likes of which he had only dreamed. He could now truly find out what “abolition” meant, perhaps even imagine a purpose or a vocation in its sacred circles. In April 1839, Garrison came to New Bedford to speak. Douglass sat in the extreme rear of the Old Congregational Meeting House and listened wide-eyed, with rapt joy. In Life and Times, he crafted a lyrical remembrance of this special moment. Whatever exactly Garrison said that night, Douglass recalled it as a classic litany of all the great editor’s “heresies.” Forgetting his many painful personal battles with Garrison for the time being, the memoirist of 1881 remembered the essentials of a Garrisonian: “His Bible was his textbook. He believed in sinless perfection . . . literal subjection to the injunction if smitten ‘on one cheek to turn the other also.’ ” As though remembering the admonitions of a New Testament Christ delivering an abolitionist version of the Sermon on the Mount, Douglass continued, “Not only was Sunday a Sabbath, but all days were Sabbaths, and to be kept holy. All sectarianism was false and mischievous. . . . Prejudice against color was rebellion against God. Of all men beneath the sky, the slaves . . . were nearest and dearest to His great heart. Those ministers who defended slavery from the Bible were of their ‘father the devil,’ and those churches which fellowshipped slaveholders as Christians, were synagogues of Satan, and our nation was a nation of liars.”19
That night in the back pew of a New Bedford church, on countless days in the pages of the Liberator, which Douglass carried to his jobs, and soon under Garrison’s own guidance, Douglass found a text and a calling. Here was an antislavery morality he had lived and that all but screamed from within his own soul. He was not yet ready in 1839–40 to become a “public advocate,” he tells us. For the moment, it was enough to “receive and applaud the great words of others, and only whisper in private, among the white laborers on the wharves, and elsewhere, the truths which burned in my breast.”20 But it would not be enough for long; Douglass was no whisperer.
During that winter of 1839, Douglass began to speak regularly at the AME Zion Church on Second Street. It is sometimes claimed that Douglass was a self-taught orator, but given his experience for at least two years in and around the pulpit at “Little Zion,” this is only partially true. In a real sense, he was trained not only by the precepts he read in Bingham’s Columbian Orator, but by the Reverends Serrington and James, as well as other visiting preachers from Boston and Providence, who taught him that the “ideal sermon” must appeal to the intellect, to emotion, and to the human will. It is easy for us to say that Douglass would have instinctively understood such homiletic techniques; but he still needed practice. Some weeks he would have preached on the liturgy and honed his biblical interpretation as well as storytelling; and what a compelling performer of Scripture readings the young Douglass must have made in front of the congregants in the simple room on Second Street.21 Douglass had indeed found his first pulpit, and he did so in a distinctively African American church.
Outside the windows of the little schoolhouse church, the issue that seems to have brought Douglass to his feet as an orator was colonization. He had no patience with the idea that people such as himself, born on American soil, escaped from slavery to a tenuous free-labor life in a relatively safe environment such as New Bedford, ought to voluntarily take his family on a ship bound for Africa, a Caribbean island, or any other foreign place. The American Colonization Society, founded in 1816 and by the late 1830s falling on hard times, launched schemes of black expatriation that violated most free African Americans’ sense of their natural rights. In the first publicly recorded instance of Douglass speaking at an antislavery meeting, held March 12, 1839, he was among ten New Bedford blacks who “ably sustained” several resolutions against colonization. The group invoked verbatim the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence, called colonization a form of tyranny, and declared with special emphasis, “We are American citizens, born with natural, inherent, just and inalienable rights.” They announced themselves especially outraged by the way colonization made “impressions . . . on the public mind” about their “moral and intellectual abilities.” That late-winter evening of 1839 was his first rehearsal for what would become a sustained, twenty-five-year condemnation of colonizationist ideas, whether they emanated from racist and profit-minded whites, or blacks themselves.22
By 1841, Douglass had delivered many sermons at AME Zion, presided over numerous meetings convened to oppose colonization, and delivered at least three addresses to white people at the Bristol County Anti-Slavery Society in New Bedford. He had further attended addresses by prominent abolitionists such as one delivered May 30, 1841, by the Reverend Henry Highland Garnet, himself another former slave from Maryland, and later an ideological rival. Douglass long remembered the Garnet speech as a special inspiration on his young abolitionist mind. Douglass was so effective as a speaker, even in his early twenties, that his local reputation spread in the streets, as well as beyond New Bedford. One or more of his performances impressed a white abolitionist in attendance, William C. Coffin, a local bookseller, Garrisonian devotee, and member of a prominent antislavery family. In August 1841, Coffin invited the black preacher to join a delegation of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society for what Douglass would later describe as a “grand . . . convention” on the island of Nantucket.23
On August 9, 1841, the Bristol County Anti-Slavery Society held a meeting with many distinguished speakers in Liberty Hall in New Bedford. Garrison himself attended, along with other leading Massachusetts abolitionists such as Parker Pillsbury, George Bradburn, John A. Collins, and Edmund Quincy. By the evening session, several “col’d individuals” addressed the meeting, particularly about the issue of racial exclusion from public transportation and from some churches. Douglass, most likely, was one of those speakers. Although his speeches on Nantucket on the following days are more celebrated, Douglass may have spoken to a prominent group of white abolitionists for the first time on this August night in New Bedford. Garrison reported that among the “talented” blacks who spoke that night, one of them was “formerly a slave.”24
The following day, Douglass and Anna boarded the steamer Telegraph for the trip out to Nantucket. Anna’s presence is remarkable; after Douglass’s speaking career took off in the 1840s, she rarely if ever accompanied him on the road. The racially mixed delegation on the steamboat numbered approximately forty, and as they boarded, the ship’s captain, named Phinney, forced the blacks to a segregated area on the upper deck. The white abolitionists joined them for the sixty-mile journey, holding an impromptu antislavery meeting in which they passed resolutions of protest against the steamship company’s discriminatory policy, as all the while, according to Parker Pillsbury, they “suffered from both sun and rain.”25
On the second day of the convention, which met in the Nantucket Atheneum Hall and was attended by as many as a thousand abolitionists, Garrison offered a poignant resolution about prejudice against blacks, accusing discriminatory white Northerners of “putting arguments into the mouths of southern task-masters, and acting as the body-guard of slavery.” Until that moment a spectator on what he later described as, in part, a “holiday,” Douglass broke his silence and rose to be one of five men supporting the resolution. What followed was what Douglass called his “first” speech, delivered in three segments. That evening, August 11, he spoke haltingly and only briefly before adjournment.26 But the next morning, the podium was his and the audience was rested and receptive.
No record exists of what he actually said on August 12 at Nantucket, but over time, as Douglass’s fame grew, many witnesses competed to describe and take credit for his “discovery.” Samuel J. May recollected that Douglass was “called upon,” and after “much hesitation” and “embarrassment” at speaking before such an august gathering of white people, “he gave evidence of such intellectual power—wisdom as well as wit—that all present were astonished.” Pillsbury too remembered Douglass’s initial “embarrassment,” but that he “gained self-possession” and rose to the “dignity of his theme.” Douglass apparently held his auditors entranced with a personalized version of a slave’s travail. Whichever stories from his youth he used to bare his heart, he held the hearts of the convention audience in his gesturing hands; the crowd, caught in the beauty and agony of the performance, could hardly have known that this young man had been practicing his new craft for some years. Douglass “spoke with great power,” wrote one witness. “Flinty hearts were pierced, and cold ones melted by his eloquence. Our best pleaders for the slave held their breath for fear of interrupting him.”27
Garrison may have left the most telling testimony of all about Douglass’s sudden emergence those two days on Nantucket. In his endorsement of Douglass’s Narrative in 1845, Garrison described a singular moment in abolition history: “I shall never forget his first speech at the convention—the extraordinary emotion it excited in my own mind—the powerful impression it created upon a crowded auditory. . . . I think I never hated slavery so intensely as at that moment.” Garrison was so moved by Douglass’s debut that he saw it with biblical resonance as well as within the tradition of American civil religion. Drawing from Psalms 8:5, Garrison believed they had found “one in intellect richly endowed—in natural eloquence a prodigy—in soul manifestly ‘created but a little lower than the angels.’ ” Then he compared Douglass’s effort to “Patrick Henry, of revolutionary fame,” and described the fugitive slave’s speech as “more eloquent” in the “cause of liberty” than any by the founders.28
According to Douglass’s own account, his theme was simply his “feelings” inspired by the occasion at the Atheneum, and the “fresh recollection of the scenes through which I had passed as a slave.” He remembered “stammering” at the beginning of his sudden moment on the podium in front of such a crowd and claimed that he “trembled in every limb.” Douglass clearly experienced an initial awkwardness and anxiety. But after gaining some poise, seeing the vivid attentiveness of people in the front rows, he stunned the audience with something most never forgot. They also never forgot Garrison’s follow-up use of the young former slave’s personal autobiographical remarks. A star was born in three days on Nantucket, and Garrison plucked the star out of the sky. Under Douglass’s inspiration, Samuel May thought Garrison delivered “one of his sublimest speeches.” Pillsbury observed a Garrison who “never before or afterwards felt more profoundly the sacredness of his mission.” Garrison recalled asking the enthralled audience whether they would ever allow such a young fugitive to be “carried back into slavery,” to which they answered “in thunder-tones—NO!” Garrison made Douglass “his text,” recalled the fugitive slave. The Liberator’s editor held forth with a “power, sweeping down, like a very tornado.”29 Before the delegation boarded the steamer for the return to New Bedford, a plan emerged, much to Douglass’s astonishment and delight, to take this individual act as well as transcendent collaboration on the road. A new vocation beckoned.
Within one week of Nantucket, Douglass found himself whisked out on the railroads and into churches and halls of eastern Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire, telling his stories from the Eastern Shore, making witness against slavery, attacking racial prejudice and proslavery churches in the North. Douglass made a deal with John Collins, the “general agent” of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, to go out on the abolitionist speaking circuit for a three-month trial. Collins served as the young man’s manager and traveling companion. Douglass said he worried that such publicity would expose him to capture and a return to slavery in Maryland. No doubt, Anna, with two babies in their crowded apartment on Ray Street in New Bedford, worried even more. But out her husband went, starting again, he later wrote, “a new life” with his “whole heart in the holy cause.” Douglass was more than ready to change, he said, from a life sustained by the “hardness of my hands, as a means of supporting myself and rearing my children,” to a life of the mind, one rooted in “reading and thinking,” and sustained by nothing more material than the power of “the word.”30 For the next five decades the mastery of words became Douglass’s life’s work.
Such a path may seem but Frederick Douglass’s destiny in retrospect, and he certainly portrayed it that way; but in the fall of 1841, nothing was certain—except that he would be paid to speak and face hatred, resistance, and violence, as he launched his more than fifty-year career as an orator. Taking enormous risks in proslavery America, Douglass eventually made untold thousands hold their breath as they listened to a voice like no other. Like Melville, he had found his “passage out,” with no idea of just where the voyage might take him.31 Only five and a half years after his Sabbath school sermons to his band of enslaved brothers on Freeland’s farm, Douglass now had friends who would give him a pulpit to the whole country, even the world.
