Frederick Douglass, May 1848. Daguerreotype. Edward White Gallery, New York.
If I speak harshly, my excuse is that I speak in fetters of your own forging. Remember that oppression hath the power to make even a wise man mad.
—FREDERICK DOUGLASS, NORTH STAR, NOVEMBER 17, 1848
For a week and a half in late April 1847, Douglass felt thrilled to immerse himself, as he wrote to Scottish Quaker friends, in the “warm bosom” of family. He rejoiced especially that his two oldest sons remembered him well, a wistful comment on the nature of their father’s place in this home that Anna made. “For once,” Douglass declared, “all cares of a public nature were cast aside, and my whole heart absorbed in grateful rapture.”1 But such joy among his children would not last long. Just where Douglass’s whole heart could ever rest, and just how he might ever find balance between the public and the private demands of his chosen paths, emerged now as the defining feature of his life.
Invitations to speak poured into Lynn. Not everyone among his friends was entirely enamored with their protégé’s new persona. Only three days after Douglass’s arrival in Boston, Wendell Phillips wrote privately, “Douglass is here, the same old sixpence, fatter, with a tinge of English precise pronunciation, the same that Redmond [Remond] and Garrison infallibly bring home and which, though good in itself, is still so foreign to our slipshod manner that I hope he will get rid of it soon.” Whether spouting some clipped English accent or not, soon the traveling man was back on the road, and this time with a confident and angrier voice. Stored in his soul, and his oratorical repertoire, were not only his life-changing triumphs in the British Isles, but also the segregated “loneliness” he had endured on the return voyage on the Cambria. Douglass processed this insult in his normal way: he poured it into his well of wounded but fierce pride and felt fortunate that he did not have to associate with the proslavery “band of wild, uproarious, gambling tipplers, whose foul-mouthed utterances interposed an impassable gulf between us.” He tried to turn his foes’ ugly ways to advantage, publicly exposing their absurd claims of superiority.2
But what to do with the anger? Douglass turned it on his own country in language that even some of his friends found troubling. In the coming year he would know precious little calm time in Lynn. After welcome-home meetings in Lynn and Boston and a trip to Albany, accompanied by Anna, to visit Rosetta, who resided there with her governesses, Abigail and Lydia Mott, Douglass was in New York on May 11 to speak at the thirteenth-anniversary meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society. This was no ordinary occasion; a crowd of nearly four thousand, the largest ever at an AASS gathering, filled the Broadway Tabernacle. Implying that he was still working on his speech, Douglass entered the hall carrying a portable writing desk. Virtually all major American abolitionists were in attendance, as were many curious newspaper reporters. After Wendell Phillips spoke, Garrison introduced Douglass with a prolonged speech of his own about the former fugitive slave’s successful sojourn in England. Garrison read from chapters 2 and 18 of Jeremiah, then long excerpts of press accounts of Douglass’s farewell address in London as well as of his travail with discrimination aboard the Cambria. Garrison finally cut short his introduction as the crowd began to shout, “Douglass! Douglass!,” thus forcing the mentor to make way for his star pupil.3
Douglass spoke not only as a returning hero from his foreign travels, but primarily as an angry young black American ready for a new kind of attack on his native land. He let it be known that, especially after his British experience, “home” and “country” were now ambivalent concepts. Douglass was excited to be back in the midst of this abolitionist community of comrades, but America was another matter. “I have no love for America, as such,” he jarringly announced. “I have no patriotism. I have no country.” Douglass let his righteous anger flow in metaphors of degradation, chains, and blood. “The institutions of this country do not know me, do not recognize me as a man, except as a piece of property.” The only thing attaching him to his native land was his family, and his deeply felt ties to the “three millions of my fellow creatures groaning beneath the iron rod . . . with . . . stripes upon their backs.” Only their “clanking . . . chains” and their “warm blood . . . making fat the soil of Maryland and of Alabama” drew him back to America. Such a country, Douglass said, he could not love. “I desire to see its overthrow as speedily as possible, and its Constitution shivered in a thousand fragments.”4 With loud cheers as well as hisses engulfing the entranced audience, Douglass stalked his prey.
Already a master of the rhetorical device of the jeremiad—calling the fallen nation back to its lost principles—but also now portraying himself as the victim of proslavery scorn, Douglass enjoyed being the aggressor. Claiming he was constantly accused of irritating Americans, rather than appealing to their better instincts, Douglass happily pled guilty: “I admit that we have irritated them,” he declared. “They deserve to be irritated. As it is in physics, so in morals, there are cases that demand irritation, and counter irritation. The conscience of the American public needs this irritation. And I would blister it all over, from centre to circumference, until it gives signs of a purer . . . life than it is now manifesting to the world.” Douglass named the demons and stalked his prey. As the latter-day Jeremiah he spoke as did the ancient prophet, calling the nation to judgment for its mendacity, its wanton violation of its own covenants, and warning of its imminent ruin.5
Saddled with the burden of having condemned his own country while abroad, Douglass reversed the charge. “Ministers of the Gospel from Christian America,” he maintained, were “pouring their leprous proslavery distilment into the ears” of foreigners and were themselves the true traitors. The British public had needed its eyes and ears opened to “the secrets of the prison house of bondage in America.” No place was safe in America for the nearly hopeless slave, nor for free blacks. “Slavery is everywhere. Slavery goes everywhere.” And nowhere could moral power alone overthrow slavery. Not in political “parties,” nor in the “press,” nor in the “pulpit.” Slavery had built its “ramparts” so strong and so high, it could thus far resist all critics. This angry and bleak portrait of the woes of his people and his country ended as only it could for a moral suasionist in the last stages of its ideological grip. Douglass turned to sentimental appeals to natural rights, argued that proslavery forces, however impregnable, could ultimately not resist the truth, then steadfastly declared himself still a man of peace and that he had never “stirred up warlike feelings while abroad,” as his accusers had claimed. Just as he seemed to demonstrate a new degree of radicalism and authenticity, Douglass retreated into an earnest Garrisonianism. He had skipped over Jeremiah’s chastisement of those who had declared, “Peace, Peace, where there is no peace.”6 Douglass had not quite yet achieved his full prophetic voice.
All of these ideas and arguments, while not new, were now a swirling set of conflicts in Douglass’s mind, packaged in an angry voice that made him, as he wished, the target of a backlash. Some responses to his Broadway Tabernacle performance were positive, but many were hostile. The poet John Greenleaf Whittier thought Douglass had been too harsh, but considered the speech a “noble refutation of the charge of the natural inferiority urged against the colored man.” But anti-abolition papers such as the New York Sun condemned the speech as “unmitigated abuse heaped on our country by the colored man Douglass.” A group of Baltimore slaveholders published Douglass’s speech in a pamphlet, distributed as a means of demonstrating the dangers of abolitionism. And a letter writer in the Boston Post reacted by labeling Douglass the new “demagogue in black.”7 Douglass was delighted to have caused such fear among his enemies, and especially to be reprinted in Baltimore! The angry young man who had stepped off the ship from Britain was ready for battle.
Notoriety, however, was a double-edged sword. Within a week of the New York speech, Douglass shot back at the Sun’s racist editor in a public letter to Thomas Van Rensselaer, editor of the black paper the Ram’s Horn, published in New York. Announcing that he sought “a little . . . sport” at the expense of the Sun’s editor, Douglass thanked him for calling him “colored” and not “nigger,” a “man” and not for once a “monkey.” Then he returned the ridicule with palpable glee. To the accusation that one ought not enjoy an invitation “into a gentleman’s house, accept his hospitality, yet ABUSE his fare,” nor “abuse a country under whose government” one is “securely protected,” Douglass reveled in the irony. As a black man in this American house he found an unsavory bill of fare: “He asks the cook for soup, he gets dish water. For salmon he gets a serpent; for beef, he gets bull frogs; for ducks, he gets gall.” Leaving those metaphors to fester, Douglass called the nation’s “Bill of Rights . . . towards us a bill of wrongs. Its self-evident truths are self-evident lies.” Douglass announced that he would not provide peace where there was no peace: “The harmony of this country is discord with the ALMIGHTY.”8
But he had an even more difficult accusation to thwart. While traveling with one of the Mott sisters on a steamer down the Hudson River from Albany to New York (after he and Anna had visited Rosetta) for the AASS meeting, Douglass slept overnight in a stateroom that adjoined his traveling companion’s room by a common door. When the captain discovered the arrangement, he threatened Douglass with racist epithets and worse. Two newspapers, one called the Switch in Albany, and another called the Subterranean in New York, exploited the story, forcing Douglass into a public explanation. The two papers entertained their readers with vile and lurid descriptions. Douglass was the “offensive creature” and the “Sambo” who walked “cheek by jowl” with Miss Mott when they visited the New York State Assembly chamber in Albany. He was the “soot head” and the “wool head,” and white New Yorkers had been “gratifying their morbid tastes in lionizing a disgusting, impertinent negro who styles himself Frederick Douglass.” Based on such stories, rumors spread, even among abolitionists, that Douglass and Miss Mott were “caught in bed together.” On June 7 Douglass finally wrote a public letter to Garrison. His version of the story, a credible one, was that he faced two choices: to sleep out on the deck with the “dogs” since the steamer would not allow him as a black man to purchase a proper cabin, or to have Miss Mott book the room next to hers. Suffering, he said, from a “severe cold and hoarseness,” a condition he frequently confronted, Douglass chose the indoor accommodation. His statement that “a thought of its propriety or impropriety never crossed my mind” seems less believable.9
In the “free, full and open explanation” he offered in the letter, Douglass denied any improper behavior, denouncing the scandal sheets. Then, as usual, whatever the truth about his flaunting of appearances, he converted the racist packaging of the charges into a fierce abolitionist argument against the worst elements of mid-nineteenth-century racism, some of which has never ceased in some American precincts. If he was “disgusting,” then he made the most of it. “The buzzard and the condor,” Douglass wrote, “are utterly disgusted with sound meat,” and “a dog afflicted with hydrophobia is utterly disgusted with the sight and scent of pure cold water.” Similarly, “a white man afflicted with colorphobia will invariably manifest . . . disgust at the sight of a respectable colored man. Colorphobia and buzzards—mad dogs and condors—think of these things!” He reminded his readers of the vicious subtlety of racism as well. His attackers had condemned his “sauciness.” Really? he asked. “How, when, where and to whom? Not as a coachman, dressed in tinseled livery, driving some delicate white ladies through . . . Broadway . . . Not as a footman, on some gilded carriage. Not as a waiter in some fashionable hotel. Not as a servant, a barber, a cook, or a steward. No I am never disgusting to the most refined Americans in any of these capacities!” Douglass turned the tide on his attackers. White people’s disgust commences “just when the colored man’s inequality is dropped, and his equality is assumed.”10 This would not be the last time Douglass used stinging analysis of racism to explain allegations about his private life. Nor was it the last time that white-male fears of his sexuality would burst into the press.
• • •
In the summer of 1847 Douglass struggled to find his feet personally and professionally. He spent considerable time in Lynn and suffered at least two weeks with what he called a “severe illness” and a friend described as scarlet fever. He pondered whether to launch his own newspaper, and whether to move his family to western New York, or possibly to Cleveland. In late June Douglass managed a public explanation for why, reluctantly, he had “given up my intention of publishing a paper for the present.” Oddly, he claimed he did not want to appear “superannuated” (older and out of touch). Appearances mattered; he worried that British philanthropy supporting his personal enterprise during the Irish famine might also be unacceptable on both sides of the ocean. But with such equivocations, it was amply clear that Douglass saw the printing press, should he buy it, as a “gift to my race.” While Garrison and his “Boston Board” of leadership discouraged their protégé from launching a competitive newspaper, some readers of the Liberator were supportive of the idea, one of them even accusing the Garrisonians of “selfish considerations” in their hostility.11 Douglass’s desire to become a black newspaperman could not be restrained.
To keep emotional stress and the future at bay, Douglass sought out the one place he knew best—the lecture circuit. By mid-July, he assured Garrison privately that he did not feel “hemmed in on every side . . . subjected to the Boston Board,” a statement at best only half true.12 Soon he eagerly joined a group of black abolitionists, including Remond, Samuel Ringgold Ward, and Henry Highland Garnet, touring across upstate New York. He spoke especially at a West Indian emancipation celebration on August 2, in Canandaigua, which included well over a thousand blacks in an outdoor setting.
After local bands and choirs performed, Douglass was the first orator of the day; he delivered an extraordinary lecture on the ancient history of slavery, on the Atlantic slave trade, and especially on the British antislavery movement. For an outdoor festival with thousands seeking shade on a hot summer day, the speech was quite a learned effort. He named at least twenty-three British abolitionists and paid warm tributes especially to William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson. He reminded auditors that all civilizations had enslaved other peoples throughout history. Using Revelation 13:10, he cautioned, “He that leadeth into captivity, shall go into captivity.” Douglass offered a compelling narration of the capture of African slaves by European traders, the complicity of the African “Prince” in the sale, and the “grim death and desolation” of the slave ships. He gave instruction on the meaning of the Somerset case of 1772, which made Britain free soil for slaves arriving from abroad, and ended with a prolonged argument for human progress marked by British emancipation, for God as the ultimate arbiter of history, and for the eternal need for “fanatical dreamers” to push history to higher moral ground.13 Douglass thus demonstrated that he was hardly the one-topic preacher of the “Slaveholder’s Sermon.” He was a reader. And by naming all those British abolitionists, he claimed their lineage.
Within the following week, with no visit to the family in Lynn, Douglass met up with Garrison for a “far West” speaking tour that would be the last great effort these two radicals would make together. They started in Philadelphia with refurbished energy and high hopes. They soon found inspired audiences as well as reinvigorated mobs determined to disrupt or destroy them. These were exuberant times for abolitionism. Garrison’s organization needed money, the American population was spreading westward in leaps and bounds, and Ohio especially had emerged as the new antislavery battleground. The AASS had established a fledgling newspaper in Salem, Ohio, the Bugle, and the indefatigable Abby Kelley, along with her husband, Stephen Foster, and others, had laid the moral-suasionist groundwork in the booming Midwest.14
The nation strained under a war in Mexico that most abolitionists condemned as proslavery aggression, and over which the political parties began to fray at their seams. Debate also raged over the Wilmot Proviso, a welcome resolution even to nonpolitical abolitionists (although it never passed Congress), which would have denied slavery any foothold in new states gained from the Mexican War. Manifest Destiny, war against a foreign “race,” boundless expansion, and a renewed national debate over the future of slavery seemed to offer propitious prospects for radical reformers about to barnstorm into the thriving farming and market towns of the Old Northwest.15
Garrison established at least two strategic themes for the tour—“comeouterism” and “disunion.” The first was the appeal that all right-thinking abolitionists should disavow any allegiances to proslavery churches. Comeouters, or denominational dissenters, had for years appealed to Revelation 18:4, to “come out” and seek a purer, more exalted Christianity. The second theme, disunion, was a more complicated, beguilingly anarchistic plea for a dissolution of the American Union as the only means to end Northern complicity with slavery. Douglass always tried his best with this Garrisonian tenet by talking the talk even when he, like many other blacks, never comprehended how to walk the walk. Disunionism was above all a test of ideological loyalty among Garrisonians. In one of his three speeches in Philadelphia, Douglass took heart from John C. Calhoun’s increasingly steadfast rejection of any Southern compromises about slavery’s expansion into the West, suggesting that this might force the North to a “separation from the slave power.” “I welcome the bolt whether it come from Heaven or from Hell, that shall sever this Union,” Douglass proclaimed as a crowd-pleaser.16 But other issues now attracted him more, especially with black audiences.
In what became a common occurrence in many places with sizable free-black populations, the famous Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church of Philadelphia held a special event in Douglass’s honor on August 6, 1847. Douglass donned his black leader’s hat and reveled in the moment. He called his role as black representative a “religious duty” of the “sweetest enjoyment.” Ideological purity hardly mattered here in the packed pews of Mother Bethel. What did matter was community survival, solidarity, and uplift. “I am one with you,” the orator assured the flock, “one in position—one in the estimate of the whites—one in the effort to gain our rights and true social condition. I feel entitled from this oneness to be heard as to what you and I should do to secure the rights which have been robbed from us.” Then he called them to greater unity and community self-help. According to press reports, Douglass left the Mother Bethel congregation in “tears” and “laughter.”17 Some nights, as he fell with weariness on a stranger’s spare bed or sofa, or if lucky in a private room of an inn, Douglass must have felt special pride in these encounters with so many former fugitive slaves and free-black compatriots. He had, after all, begun his orator’s career in front of an AME congregation.
But such joys were always short-lived. Before leaving Pennsylvania, Douglass and Garrison faced vicious mobs reminiscent of the early 1840s on the One Hundred Conventions tour. Radical abolitionists were generally widely feared and hated, but Douglass, his fame now spreading in advance of every appearance, was a special target. As they moved west, Garrison and Douglass held a gathering in the courthouse at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Garrison made it through a one-hour speech undisturbed, but only minutes after Douglass took the floor a mob began hurling rotten eggs and all manner of stones and brickbats through the windows and the door while shouting their practiced refrain, “Throw out the nigger!” Douglass tried to carry on, but as eggs smashed into Garrison’s head and a stone grazed Douglass’s own face, the meeting broke up in chaos. With the mob screaming, “Let the damned nigger have it!,” and the room filling up with what he called “slavery’s choice incense,” Douglass locked arms with a small group of black men who provided a protective escort out of the building.18
The fearless reformers stayed on two more days in Harrisburg, where they addressed the local Colored Methodist Church. “A more interesting array of faces I have seldom looked upon,” Douglass warmly reported. He was especially moved by the women of the congregation, who were so well turned out and in charge of a benevolent society for self-improvement they had named the Douglass Union. But after the train stopped in Chambersburg to switch the passengers to a stagecoach for the long journey over the Allegheny Mountains to Pittsburgh, Garrison’s ticket had to be reissued for the following day as Douglass traveled on alone. For the next two days and nights through mountain passes and small villages, Douglass encountered what he called “brutal insults and outrages.” He was denied food along the journey, spending forty-eight hours without a meal. Discouraged and hungry, he arrived in Pittsburgh to a welcome by a local brass band and handshakes from the local black lawyer John Vashon. These kinds of pitiful ironies—a hero in small black communities one day and the object of racist attacks and humiliations the next—now formed a way of life for this young symbol of abolitionism. Before leaving the Pittsburgh area, Douglass rejoiced that among the black delegation he met the enormously talented “noble specimen of a man” Martin R. Delany.19 Within four months the two men would collaborate to create a newspaper. Douglass’s ambitions were as expansive as his courage.
By mid-August, via steamboats, canal barges, coaches, and the occasional slow train, the western tour surged into Ohio, attracting growing outdoor gatherings unlike any other American abolition had ever seen. Douglass mustered a sense of humor about the hardships of travel in this crusade of retail radicalism: “We are carried by horses, fed by corn instead of fire—bone instead of iron.” People came in wagons and on horseback from many miles around to festival-like meetings from Ashtabula to Youngstown, Massillon to Leesburg, Salem to Munson. They had tapped into the grass roots of the free-labor militancy and Christian idealism of the Western Reserve. Many of these revivalist assemblages grew to between three thousand and six thousand people. As Douglass announced to a colleague, “It was pleasant to see our cause look popular for once.” Douglass was especially impressed with the women who played such key roles in organizing these events and with those such as Lucretia Mott and Abby Kelley who took to the rostrum as speakers.20
As the salvation show moved across the Midwestern farmland, some of these meetings took place in the great Oberlin Tent. A thousand feet in diameter, the tent could hold up to five thousand people. This structure, spread out on a rural Midwestern landscape, surrounded by booths, covered wagons by the hundreds, and the “auctioneering,” as Douglass put it, of a grand antislavery fair, was a sight never to be forgotten. The Boston abolitionists called the great tent, constructed at the abolitionist college town in northern Ohio, the portable Faneuil Hall. After local choirs sang an audience into joyous expectations, Douglass and Garrison would step up on a platform and try to project to the outer edges of the tent flaps. They preached about the usual topics, as well as the dreams of the fugitives passing through northeastern Ohio. They inveighed against Ohio’s notorious “black laws,” the many discriminatory statutes still on the books that prescribed the political, civil, and educational lives of free African Americans. Douglass especially continued his embittered critique of an American promise gone wrong, stymied and poisoned by slavery, racism, and complacency even out on these fertile prairies where immigrants and New Englanders had gone for renewal. Sometimes, as the Garrisonian Samuel May reported, audiences “winced” at Douglass’s ridicule of the nation’s religious and political life.21
But it was not easy performing the role of twenty-nine-year-old hero-prophet. Both men became worn-out and ill. Douglass repeatedly suffered from his “old throat complaint,” and often could “hardly make himself heard.” By the time they reached Youngstown, as Garrison reported, Douglass was “entirely exhausted and voiceless.” He would sometimes appear with a damp cloth tied around his throat. After rising on a makeshift platform to tremendous cheers, his voice would creak and crack. Garrison fared even worse under the punishing schedule. By September he fell extremely ill, leaving the tour and remaining debilitated and at times in delirium in Cleveland with what may have been typhoid fever. Douglass surged on without him. Garrison eventually recovered and returned to Boston in autumn, but not before the entire antislavery community wondered if the western tour might be the death of him.22
Douglass continued the tour back into western New York, holding meetings across the state from Buffalo to Rochester to Syracuse. He repeatedly visited post offices trying to get some word of Garrison’s health. This issue became one among many matters of strain and dispute later, with Garrison claiming that his protégé had left him behind and had not even inquired about his well-being. The slow but certain parting of ways of the two abolitionists soon reached an acute stage as Douglass reversed himself and decided to found his own newspaper. Still in Cleveland in late October 1847, but finally recovering from his illness, Garrison wrote a long letter to his wife, Helen, ending with an embittered PS: “Is it not strange that Douglass has not written a single line to me, or to any one, inquiring after my health, since he left me on a bed of illness?” But worse, the weakened mentor felt silently rebuked and betrayed about the newspaper: “He never opened to me his lips on the subject,” wrote Garrison, “nor asked my advice in any particular whatsoever. Such conduct grieves me to the heart.” The Liberator’s founder had opposed Douglass’s independent venture, which the young editor called the North Star, from the very inception of the idea; Garrison vowed that it “must be met with firmness,” and he intended to determine who was “at the bottom of all of this.”23 Douglass had challenged the house of Garrison, which had formed and nurtured him, but could no longer fully contain his ambitions.
On the western tour, Douglass had laid the groundwork for the venture, especially by enlisting Martin Delany as a coeditor and connecting once again with his friends Amy and Isaac Post in Rochester. He also enlisted the black Garrisonian William Cooper Nell to join him as publisher, and John Dick, an Englishman who would relocate to Rochester to be Douglass’s printer. Before returning home finally to Lynn in October, Douglass spent four days in Albany and Troy, New York, where he participated among the sixty-six delegates at a National Colored Convention. Albany was a rough town, where Douglass yet again endured racist attacks, much of which he attributed to the “flood of immorality and disgusting brutality” arriving via the Erie Canal. Among the resolutions passed at the convention was one to create a “national press” for blacks. Tellingly, Douglass abstained on the resolution, knowing that he was about to announce his own paper, and holding his cards close to his chest.24
William Lloyd Garrison, c. 1851. Daguerreotype. Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah John Hawes photographers.
From the day he launched the idea of becoming an independent journalist, so much depended on his British benefactors. Some of them, especially Englishwomen who wrote to Maria Weston Chapman at the AASS office regaling her with how much they “loved,” were “inspired by,” or felt “deeply attached to” Frederick, had spilled the beans about the newspaper at the very headquarters of Garrisonianism. Nothing fired Chapman’s ready suspicion about Douglass’s evolving apostasy more than those adoring messages from British women. Chapman was, after all, trying to raise money for the Liberator from these same women. Douglass did not tell Garrison himself about his new intentions, a problem common in strained father-and-son-like relationships. The AASS had made it possible for Douglass to write his regular letters and columns in the National Anti-Slavery Standard, hoping that this would satisfy his desires in journalism.25 But nothing could stop Douglass’s quest to launch this new chapter in the making of his voice.
Douglass repeatedly said that he wanted to have his own enterprise as a mouthpiece for his race. But in a letter to his English friend Julia Griffiths, he revealed the deeper well of his ambition. With the help of numerous British comrades, many of whom Douglass named, Julia had sent Frederick a large “collection of books, pamphlets, tracts, and pictures,” all to aid him on his journey to journalism. Griffiths’s father, Thomas, a printer and publisher, had been one of the organizers of the farewell soiree for Douglass in London, an event Julia had attended with her sister, Eliza. Douglass was deeply moved by the gift, but even in this tender note of gratitude he remained the autobiographer watching his own life: “You will the more readily understand my pleasure at receiving such a gift when I tell you that but a few years ago, the fingers now penning this note of thanks, were used in fishing from the muddy street gutters in Baltimore, scattered pages of the Bible.” Douglass conducted his public quest to destroy slavery and to be somebody with an eye almost always squinting in a backward glance to the Eastern Shore. “What a contrast is my present with my former condition. Then a slave, now a free man; then degraded, now respected; then ignorant . . . my name unheard of beyond the limits of a republican slave plantation; now my friends and benefactors, people of both hemispheres, to heaven the praise belongs!”26 Within a year and a half Julia herself would join Douglass’s newspaper enterprise.
By late October Douglass was “buying type and all the little &c.s of a printing establishment,” as he informed Amy Post. British money kept flowing into Lynn in a timely fashion; he acknowledged a generous draft for £445 from Jonathan D. Carr, a successful Quaker biscuit manufacturer in Carlisle, who served as a treasurer among the Douglass fund-raising network in England. Douglass named the paper the North Star and in November moved to Rochester, a thriving city of fifty thousand, a hub on the Erie Canal, and a significant haven for fugitive slaves on their way to Canada. He rented an office in the Talman Building at 25 Buffalo Street, in the heart of the business district. Until February 1848, he boarded with Charles Joiner, a local black clothes cleaner, leaving his family back in Lynn. Once again, Anna and the children waited for the next disruption in their lives. Douglass plowed all of his money into the North Star, buying a printing press, which proved faulty. He repeatedly took on debt to keep the paper afloat during its first uncertain year. But the first issue came out on December 3, 1847, and Douglass made it clear that he was a political abolitionist in the making. In an open letter to the Whig Party leader, Henry Clay, Douglass unleashed a fierce attack on the Kentuckian’s alleged moderation as a slaveholder. Clay, according to the new editor, was the worst of all things—a well-meaning slaveholder—and his alleged “benevolence” merely “so much of Satan dressed in the livery of Heaven.”27
Douglass launched the North Star with great exuberance, and though it spoke for “Liberty, Humanity, and Progress,” as he stated in the opening prospectus, the paper was to be a proud black enterprise. It would do what “it would be wholly impossible for our white friends to do for us.” The four earlier black-edited papers had all been short-lived. “Our race must be vindicated from the embarrassing implications resulting from former non-success,” Douglass announced. In a separate plea written directly to black readers, he promised to attack slavery in the South and racism in the North with equal fervor. He would offer himself as their voice assailing the “ramparts of Slavery and Prejudice.” He further promised to advocate for rights, but also to chastise his fellow blacks when necessary about their obligations and failures. Above all he offered himself as model, “one with you,” having “writhed beneath the bloody lash” and “under the slander of inferiority.” He would vehemently promote learning in all its forms, but “accord most merit to those who have labored hardest, and overcome most in . . . pursuit of knowledge.”28 This was a black paper edited by a former slave! Irony was often Douglass’s principal rhetorical weapon; now he boldly offered himself as its very embodiment.
He had taken a great risk. Douglass did not yet know how to edit a newspaper. Delany had some experience, sporadically editing his own Mystery (which ended in early 1847) in Pittsburgh, but his role was to go on the road all over the North to solicit subscriptions in black communities. When the printing press proved ineffective, Douglass had to hire out the printing to William Clough, one floor above the North Star’s office, for approximately $20 weekly. This fledgling operation stumbled along into 1848; subscriptions grew to approximately seven hundred by mid-January, with papers eventually sent before year’s end to Britain, Canada, Mexico, Australia, and even parts of the South. In December, Douglass received a warm letter of support from Gerrit Smith, the wealthy upstate New York abolitionist, containing $5 for a two-year subscription, and signaling the beginning of an important long-term relationship with the rich political activist. Frustratingly, however, only handfuls of blacks took the paper, although Douglass did receive accolades from some fellow black abolitionists and friends. One of them, William Cooper Nell, worked hard for the North Star, but he struggled with his conflicted loyalties to Garrison and the Liberator.29
Delany, on the other hand, traveled widely on a “western tour” of free black communities during 1848, soliciting readers and subscriptions as well as writing a remarkable array of travel letters published in the paper. It has often been assumed that the Douglass-Delany partnership, because they soon severed ties and eventually became ideological rivals, crippled the North Star in its first years. But Delany’s literary output for Douglass’s paper left an important mark. Frustrations abounded, however, between the two men. In mid-January 1848, Douglass seemed frantic to know Delany’s whereabouts, complaining about $55-per-week expenses, slow growth in subscriptions, and going to press yet “again much to my regret without a single line from your pen.” A week later Douglass did receive the first of twenty-three public letters Delany would produce over the next thirteen months from such “western” cities as Pittsburgh, Columbus, Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Detroit. As Douglass wrote every week for the paper, while constantly running around upstate New York to lecture for fees that helped pay bills, Delany visited schools, churches, fraternal orders, and courtrooms in small communities across the Midwest, reporting back a kind of ethnography about the needs for “elevation” among the very people he and Douglass were trying to attract into their readership. Still, few bought subscriptions, leaving Douglass discouraged about the “uphill” task before them as he did “all I can by lectures and letters to keep our heads above the water.”30
Whether Douglass and Delany were ever really “co-editors,” as the masthead claimed, is doubtful. The two men hailed from quite different backgrounds. Born free in western Virginia, educated at the Harvard Medical School, Delany was six years older than Douglass and did not fit well as a subordinate partner. They had lived different lives; Delany was much darker than the lead editor and knew that all of his grandparents were African. But for a while they sustained an effective collaboration. In the spring and summer of 1848, Delany’s letters from Pennsylvania and Ohio maintained a steady drumbeat for black self-improvement, a theme Douglass himself championed. They saw themselves as preceptors of black uplift within a rigidly racist society.
“Colored People!” Delany proclaimed, “we want more businessmen among us; farmers, mechanics and tradesmen. . . . Let our people put their children—first to school, next to trades.” All over growing Ohio he spotted “respectable and praiseworthy” black families and was especially taken with the “cleanliness” of the cottages in the town of Hamilton. Douglass wrote a stinging editorial in July, “What Are the Colored People Doing for Themselves,” in which he prodded blacks to higher attainments of “being honest, industrious, sober and intelligent,” as he also berated them for not subscribing to his newspaper. A hectoring Douglass complained that free blacks might attend an Odd Fellows or a Freemason convention by the thousands but could not stoop to read his paper. He bashed black preachers and churches for filling their pews on Sundays but not “meddling with abolitionism” on weekdays. He wanted his people to “read . . . speak and write,” and then to act. “What is the use of standing a man on his feet,” declared the discouraged editor, “if when we let him go, his head is again brought to the pavement?” In what served as a motto of his own early life, Douglass shouted from the page, “For the want of knowledge we are killed all day!” With equally potent zeal, Delany preached from the same text in Midwestern depots such as Chillicothe and Cyrus Settlement.31
But both men too kept up a constant exposure of the racist mob violence that Delany encountered on the road, and which Douglass knew all too well. They also levied an embittered critique of the black laws that barred free blacks from courts of law, civic life, or the ballot box. As it limped from week to week, the North Star became both a repository and a trumpet for the great dual cause of black abolitionism—internal community self-improvement and the external quest for citizenship. And it was a presidential election year; Douglass made sure the North Star kept one eye on the broiling issue of slavery expansion animating national politics.32 Despite his financial worries, that editor’s desk forced Douglass to think more broadly about the power and limits of words, and the nature of antislavery activism.
In this frenzied time, Douglass went back to Lynn and moved his family to Rochester in February 1848. The move was difficult for Anna; she had made a life for herself in Lynn, as a mother, a shoe binder, and seamstress who had lived more months without her husband than with him over the past six years. What she knew and understood of Frederick’s world of ideas, friends, travels, and experiences she had processed through protective psychological barriers. This talented domestic woman, who remained illiterate next to the man made and sustained by words, packed up her three boys (Rosetta remained in Albany with her governesses, the Mott sisters) and trekked across Massachusetts and upstate New York to a small tenement in downtown Rochester. Isaac Post helped to secure the apartment. But no wonder Douglass wrote to the Mott sisters just after the family’s move complaining of his “gloomy” circumstances. He was a “most unhappy man,” he confessed. His “house hunting” floundered and Anna had “not been well—or very good humored since we came here.” Douglass often unloaded his personal woes in letters to his best women friends, many of whom seemed thoroughly willing to perform as his sounding board. He missed those “words of love and sympathy” the Motts might provide him. He missed Rosetta and wished she would write to him more so he could “see her hand writing.” And the travails of his lecturing travels weighed on him. “This riding all night is killing me,” he moaned.33
In April the Douglasses purchased a house from a local abolitionist at 4 Alexander Street. The two-story, nine-room brick dwelling had a front porch where Anna could put a rocker and a yard for a garden as spring arrived. Upstairs, Douglass had a study with a table, books, and a “list of the words he found it hard to spell,” as a neighbor reported. The children entered schools and Anna likely made some connections with the small black community of some 162 households in Rochester. All was not sour in the Douglasses’ marriage; that summer they conceived their fifth child. In a personal reminiscence written in 1917, the youngest son, Charles, recalled a rosy, sentimental homestead at Alexander Street, where he and his brothers attended common schools but were increasingly “taken from school one day in each week to deliver the paper to local subscribers,” or to learn typesetting. Charles believed the North Star survived as a collective family enterprise: “To maintain this paper, every effort was put forth by every member of the family to keep it alive.”34
But life on Alexander Street and getting out the paper on Buffalo Street were much more complex matters. Douglass never had enough money in these years and would soon have to mortgage his house again to pay his staff at the newspaper. In late April he wrote to Julia Griffiths that he was struggling to “find the bright side of the future.” He worried openly that he might have “undertaken more than I have the ability to perform.” He feared he had “miscalculated . . . the amount of support which would be extended to my enterprise.” In this cry for help Douglass complained that Delany had not done enough to raise subscriptions, leaving the editor alone doing everything. He confessed that he had “expended more than the some [sic] sent me from England, and shall require sixty dollars per week for six months to come in order to keep my paper a float.”35 Douglass dearly needed help. Griffiths, who wrote to him frequently and sent him leading British newspapers, heard his cry. She visited him in Rochester for a short time later that fall, steadied his spirits, and a year later, in May 1849, making an extraordinary commitment, relocated to America and helped the North Star, and Frederick himself, survive into the 1850s.
Douglass’s maintenance of an equilibrium amid all these pressures of home and his own ambition defied the odds. In part, he managed from month to month because of Anna’s steadfast care for the children and the hearth; she was his ultimate “helpmeet,” as he admitted many times. The family stood waiting there on each of his homecomings, and the North Star was theirs as well. Douglass sustained his inner psychological standing in part by the sheer force of will and what he called his “pen and tongue.” That he managed to keep the North Star alive through those first years is a testament to his stamina and his growing felicity with the short essay. He had established himself as a world-class orator. But the newspaper now became his reason to be. The North Star “shall live” or “must be sustained,” he would often say, not as a mere expression of business enterprise, but for his own sheer existence. The paper became, as he later recalled, the “motive power” of his life. Douglass tested his ideas and began to grasp the landscape of politics through the lens of the North Star. “It was the best school possible for me,” he wrote. “It obliged me to think and read, it taught me to express my thoughts clearly.” He had to produce the words that were both burden and liberation. “I had an audience to speak to every week, and must say something worth their hearing or cease to speak altogether.” Douglass relished what he called his editor’s “sting of necessity,” and his evolving voice became both more pragmatic and more radical as it became more political.36
That summer of 1848, Douglass made one of his big strides into the politics of reform by supporting women’s rights and participating at the Seneca Falls convention on July 19–20. The idea for such a convention had longed brewed among feminists and women’s rights advocates. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who lived in Seneca Falls, and a group of Quaker women gathered around Mary Ann M’Clintock and her two daughters, Mary Ann and Elizabeth, in Waterloo, New York, along with the skillful aid of Lucretia Mott, put out a call for a convention in the Seneca County Courier on July 11. Douglass responded immediately by running the appeal in the North Star on July 14. Some three hundred people attended the two-day historic assembly in the Wesleyan Methodist Chapel of Seneca Falls. Douglass eagerly joined his Rochester friend Amy Post at the convention. The gathering was largely local with attendees coming mainly from the upstate region. Some husbands of these women reformers, as well as other male abolitionists, attended, but most did not. Issues of women’s place, much less equal rights, had long been lightning rods in the antislavery movement in Britain and the United States.37
But Douglass never exhibited any ambiguity or caution. His many women friends had taught him much. The convention famously produced a “Declaration of Sentiments,” modeled directly on the Declaration of Independence. With the word women inserted (“all men and women are created equal”) where appropriate, the more than a dozen resolutions accompanying the document covered all manner of demands for equality in jobs, in courts of law, in family relations, religion, and education. All resolutions passed unanimously except the controversial claim for the elective franchise. So contested was the issue of voting that many women leaders, such as Lucretia Mott, refused to support it, fearing they would lose the ultimate hope of gaining any rights because of this demand. But during the afternoon debate of the second day’s meeting, Douglass forcefully endorsed full women’s suffrage, which may have helped win the day in a divided vote. In his North Star report about Seneca Falls, Douglass expressed great pride at participating and called the demands “simple justice.” He freely admitted that all in favor of women’s equality courted “ridicule . . . fury and bigotry.” But he did not equivocate. Civil society had been deprived too long of the labor and talent of half the human family, he said. “There can be no reason in the world for denying to woman the exercise of the elective franchise.” Douglass was the only black person attending the Seneca Falls convention, and it remained a matter of lifetime pride that he was among the thirty-two men and sixty-eight women who signed the “Declaration of Sentiments.” He would always be delighted to be called “a women’s rights man.” The motto on the masthead of the North Star, “Right is of No Color and No Sex,” had been no mere sentiment.38
Throughout 1848, Douglass took an ever-keener interest in national politics, even as he managed still to denounce the corruptions of parties. One Douglass biographer sees the editor’s overall North Star prose style as “rather solemnly polemical,” while another points to his love of “irony, humor and ambiguity” and therefore a prose that “sounded more genteel.”39 Neither is wrong, but it is hard to miss how Douglass’s journalistic as well as oratorical voice in these years sounded furious and militant as he became more political. His rhetoric carried more Old Testament pain and rage; Jeremiah caught a second wind. He took up the editor’s pen to provoke his readers into action. The humor and entertainment of the lecture hall gave way to opinion and the persuasiveness of the editorial. To that person who had called him the “demagogue in black,” it was as if Douglass responded by saying something like Thank you; if you want a demagogue, I will give you a demagogue. His model journalist, after all, was William Lloyd Garrison.
Douglass read widely in the national and the British press about the republican revolutions breaking out all over Europe, especially in France in February and March 1848. He took heart as monarchy and slavery in the French empire came under assault from a movement of universal egalitarianism. “We live in stirring times and amid thrilling events,” he told an audience at a West Indian emancipation celebration in Rochester on August 1. Brandishing historical detail, he turned a shared identity with the French proletariat back onto the “atrocious wickedness” of American slavery. While Europeans strove to free themselves from centuries of tyranny, Americans could only mouth awkward half-truths of support, and voters could only choose between “tyrants and men-stealers to rule over us.”40
In revolutionary times, Douglass concluded, “some lives may indeed be lost.” In public he frequently invoked the memory of Nat Turner as a noble slave rebel to compare to the French, Germans, and Italians at their barricades, gunned down in the streets. Douglass now mixed this early embrace of violent means with one of his favorite tactics—heaping blame on white Northerners for their complicity with slavery. In a speech in Faneuil Hall in Boston, he told his friendly auditors, “You are the enslavers of my southern brethren and sisters.” By their participation under the US Constitution, he similarly charged the Rochester throng on August 1 with bringing the “bristling bayonets of the whole military power of the nation” down on the lives of slaves. Had not Nat Turner, Douglass intoned, only acted with the “self-same means which the Revolutionary fathers employed?” Those Rochester journalists who remarked about the “sarcastic tones” and the “bitterness” of Douglass’s public rhetoric had heard him loud and clear.41
Douglass also pulled the story back within the human heart. On September 3, 1848, the tenth anniversary of his escape from slavery, he published a public letter to his former master, Thomas Auld. The letter is a masterpiece of antislavery propaganda as well as an expression of personal rage. Although the missive contained some inaccuracies—especially the accusation that Auld had abandoned Betsy Bailey out to fields to fend for herself or die—which Douglass later had to recant, Auld’s former property boldly put his old master to his service. With Auld as his model, Douglass flayed every slaveholder who had ever lifted a lash or sold a human being. This was Douglass’s personal symbolic whipping of Auld and an indictment in front of a jury of history. The chosen tool of punishment was the pen.42
Douglass had many times used Auld as the “slaveholder” in speeches, especially when exposing the religious hypocrisy of Southern Methodists. Now, Douglass addressed him directly by name and dared him not to listen. The letter is funny, falsely and formally delicate, and at times quite moving. A Douglass biographer has contended that the letter is “one of the strangest pieces in the literature of American slavery” because of its “peculiar distortions.” But accuracy is not the best measure of the letter. Douglass sought new recruits for the abolition cause and readers for the North Star. He hit some new notes as he settled some old scores. He played with Auld, offering a justification for invading the “proprieties of private life” in his former owner’s quiet corner of the Eastern Shore. “I will not manifest ill temper by calling you hard names,” he assured Auld. But he also made his intent explicit: “I intend to make use of you as a weapon with which to assail the system of slavery.” Douglass did flail about a bit; but he landed many reverberating blows. He prompted angry responses to the humiliation of Auld from as far away as a slaveholder in Georgia who wrote, “As emancipationists you colored fellows are the worst. . . . As well may the dog claim to be a man, as the negro a free man and equal among those that God designed to be his superior. The order of nature can be as soon reverted to any good in the one case as in the other.”43
In addressing Auld, Douglass lectured him about the natural right to self-ownership: “I am myself; you are yourself; we are two distinct persons, equal persons. What you are I am. . . . God created both, and made us separate beings. I am not by nature bound to you, or you to me. Nature does not make your existence depend upon me, or mine to depend upon yours.” Douglass especially used Auld to demonstrate how far his slave had risen, how he had created a family, how he had made the successful “transition from degradation to respectability.” He pointed to his comfortable house, his “industrious and neat” wife, his “four dear children,” three of whom were in school. Then, by contrast, in the most moving lines of the letter, he wrenched his readers into slavery’s domestic heart of darkness: “They [the children] are all in comfortable beds, and are sound asleep, perfectly secure under my roof. There are no slaveholders here to rend my heart by snatching them from my arms, or blast a mother’s dearest hopes by tearing them from her bosom.” Here, Douglass’s rage against slavery found its outlet: “Oh! Sir, a slaveholder never appears to me so completely an agent of hell, as when I think of and look upon my dear children. It is then that my feelings rise above my control.”44
Mercilessly, Douglass dragged Auld back into their shared history, with the tides turned: “Say not that this is a picture of fancy. You well know that I wear stripes on my back inflicted by your direction; and that you, while we were brothers in the same church, caused this right hand, with which I am now penning this letter, to be closely tied to my left, and my person dragged at the pistol’s mouth, fifteen miles, from the Bay side to Easton to be sold like a beast in the market.”45 Douglass avoids how Auld did not sell him south, but sent him back to Baltimore. In 1848 the facts were aligned thus for a reason. A liberated Douglass, man of letters, must still be seen through the lens of the manacled Fred Bailey. He loved the reversal and reworked his story on Auld’s back.
The letter to Auld was a public humiliation, a symbolic indictment of all the thousands of white slaveholding “fathers” through the years. Douglass demands to know from Auld whether he had sold his sisters. He even insists that his former owner imagine Douglass invading Auld’s St. Michaels house, kidnapping his own daughter, Amanda, and selling her to the “brutal lust of fiendish overseers.” Although there was no evidence that Auld had ever broken up families or sold away Frederick’s female kin, Douglass used the letter as a defense of the virtue of black womanhood.46 In Douglass’s innuendo about the rape of his mother, and in trading on slavery’s sexual nightmares, as well as the mystery of his own paternity, he gave to antislavery literature this barely controlled eruption of human rage.
• • •
The North Star had to get written, edited, and printed every week. The nation’s evolving crisis over slavery’s expansion in the wake of the Mexican War, and especially the presidential election that fall, had to be explained. Douglass often blurred the lines between his private and public alienation. The demands of succinctness in the columns of the newspaper provided a disciplined retreat for this man of words, barely holding on to an equipoise he only half comprehended. Venting on Auld and blasting the slaveholding nation became one and the same task. In the election of 1848, Douglass supported the new Free Soil Party and its candidate, former president Martin Van Buren; Douglass even attended its convention in Buffalo in September. But he was deeply disappointed by the election of the slaveholder war hero General Zachary Taylor. In a postelection editorial, “The Blood of the Slave on the Skirts of the Northern People,” Douglass wryly apologized if he “should seem severe” or “speak harshly.” But he felt “a thousand poisonous stings” in his heart as he reflected on the state of the Union. Douglass told white Northern voters that the “blood of the slave is on your garments. . . . You have said that slavery is better than freedom—that war is better than peace, and that cruelty is better than humanity.”47
Douglass kept Jeremiah’s sword sharpened, addressing the nation as his audience: “What mean ye that ye bruise and bind my people? Will justice sleep forever? . . . Repent of this wickedness . . . by delivering the despoiled out of the hands of the despoiler.” He refused to extend peace where there was no peace. Douglass signaled hope with the only weapon in his arsenal. Abolition would spring forth, he contended, “from the press and on the voice of the living speaker, words of burning truth, to alarm the guilty, to unmask the hypocrite, to expose the frauds of political parties, and rebuke the spirit of a corrupt and sin-sustaining church.” Douglass announced, without fully knowing it, the theme of his and the country’s life for the next decade: “Slavery will be attacked in its stronghold—the compromises of the Constitution, and the cry of disunion shall be more fearlessly proclaimed, till slavery be abolished, the Union dissolved, or the sun of this guilty nation must go down in blood.”48
Words that burn—Douglass’s stock-in-trade. He borrowed a page from Nat Turner as he also strove to honor the principles of Garrison. Ultimately he could not do both. Soon, Julia Griffiths arrived from England to help him navigate these troubled waters.
