Amy Post, Douglass’s old friend and confidant in Rochester.
When the influence of office or any other influence shall soften my hatred of tyranny and violence do not spare me; let fall upon me the lash of your keenest and most withering censure.
—FREDERICK DOUGLASS, 1879
In mid-January 1877, a blizzard swept across western New York State. Frederick Douglass was once again out on the winter lecturing circuit. He found himself “snowbound fifteen miles from Corfu,” a town between Buffalo and Rochester. He was unable to get east or west for two days, he told his friend Amy Post, who had long been an important confident. With the assistance of seven locomotives, he slowly reached Buffalo on tracks overlaid with snowdrifts. Almost unbelievably, his destination on this trip was first Detroit and then Traverse City, Michigan, far up in the northwest corner of that state’s lower peninsula. “I am now about disgusted with my tour and wish myself back under your hospitable roof,” he wrote to Mrs. Post, “but the idea of duty, which has hitherto commanded me is still my master and will compel me to go on.” He persevered and did indeed reach Traverse City to lecture there on January 19. This grueling two-month tour of at least thirty-three hundred miles by rail, carriages, horseback, and perhaps even oxcart, delivering both political speeches and the “Self-Made Men” address in at least thirty-three towns and cities, took him from Pennsylvania through New York, to Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, and back through Ohio to Pennsylvania again and home to Washington, DC. The tour included all the usual indignities, including yet another Jim Crow incident. In Springfield, Missouri, Douglass was “invited,” as he put it, into the kitchen to get his breakfast at his hotel. He rejected the segregation and refused to eat. “The South is still the hell-black South,” he remarked to a reporter, “and will remain so for a good while longer.”1 That “idea of duty” Douglass named was still the primary livelihood of the burgeoning extended family of Douglasses, Spragues, and others.
While passing through Columbus, Ohio, on February 17, Douglass conducted an interview with the presumptive president-elect, Rutherford B. Hayes, then still governor of that state. James Poindexter, the black minister of Second Baptist Church in Columbus, accompanied Douglass to the meeting. Even with the disputed election crisis in full fury, they may have discussed an appointment for Douglass in the federal government. Hayes recorded in his diary that Douglass gave him “many useful hints” about the “Southern question.” The governor then described his position to Douglass: “My course is firm assertion and maintenance of the rights of the colored people of the South, according to the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments—coupled with a readiness to recognize all Southern people, without regard to past political conduct, who will now go with me heartily and in good faith in support of these principles.” These were the two opposed parts of Hayes’s vision of the post-Reconstruction South. Douglass had both personal and ideological reasons to share in such hope. Within a week of his meeting with Douglass, the president-elect crafted three paragraphs to be used in pending speeches. Again, Hayes searched for a careful, if firm, middle ground. The three amendments were to be “sacredly observed and faithfully enforced,” and a new policy enacted to “cause sectionalism to disappear, and that will tend to wipe out the color line.”2
Douglass had long known that even forlorn hope that mocked historical experience was sometimes better than despair. A year and a half later in a newspaper interview, however, he recollected the Columbus session with Hayes in harsher political terms. In the meeting, Douglass had announced his “sense of alarm” at the new president’s conciliation toward the South. For an hour, Douglass claimed, he gave Hayes a historical review of the last forty years of the “exactions and arrogance” of the Slave Power. He warned that white Southerners considered themselves above the law, and that they had the blood of thousands of blacks on their hands. Douglass insisted that a policy of “conciliation would be as pearls cast before swine,” and that what white Southerners most needed “was to be taught that there is a God in Israel.”3 After inviting God’s wrath down on the South, he and Hayes had parted, Douglass remembered, with mutual respect.
Shortly after the inauguration in early March, Hayes put Douglass’s name forward for marshal of the District of Columbia. All of Douglass’s family, as well as many friends, dearly hoped for such a position. Early that spring Ottilie Assing, for once speaking for all of them, said that the appointment might not only be “honorable and lucrative,” but relieve the orator “of the necessity of undertaking each winter those dangerous, difficult, and unhealthy lecture tours.” The appointment as marshal was the first time in American history that an African American was nominated for a position that required Senate approval. The job, which Douglass himself later called “important and lucrative,” made him part of the federal criminal justice system. The marshal posted all bankruptcies in the District and remanded all prisoners back and forth between jail and the courts. In effect, he helped run the federal court that once adjudicated fugitive-slave cases. Hayes did, however, buckle under to prejudice by relieving Douglass of one traditional duty—introducing distinguished guests at White House receptions. The new marshal accepted the slight, although in his later autobiography he lampooned the reasons for it. The great apprehension at his appointment reflected not only fear that he would “Africanize the courts,” he wrote, by hiring black clerks, but of the “dreadful” image of “a colored man at the Executive Mansion in white kid gloves, sparrow-tailed coat, patent-leather boots, and alabaster cravat, performing the ceremony—a very empty one—of introducing the aristocratic citizens.”4 Douglass might have enjoyed wearing the cravat and the fancy coat, but had no interest in being a high-placed butler.
Odd as it may seem to us today, the appointment caused both a storm of protest and a wave of celebration in the press. Opposition to Douglass’s appointment came primarily from a group of white Washington lawyers, as well as a few black leaders and office seekers. “Everybody admits that he is a man of high culture,” said the Washington Star, “and thoroughly educated, but they claim he is too theoretical.” Some blacks supposedly complained that Douglass was “too high-toned” to represent the “mass of his people.” Members of the bar association argued that the former slave possessed the “incapacity of a child for a position requiring tact, executive ability and a large knowledge of man.” Other whites dismissed him for lacking “business capacity.” Many newspapers covered Douglass’s elevation to marshal with what the New York Times called “dramatic interest.” The Washington Sentinel complimented Hayes’s fervor for civil service reform as evidenced in the Douglass appointment. But Forney’s Sunday Chronicle said the president should have given Douglass a position “less embarrassing.” One paper could not resist the ironies of this former outlaw slave now so central to law enforcement. The New York Evangelist reported that an ex-constable in the city, when asked by a bailiff “if he was looking for Marshal Douglass,” replied, “No, sir, not now; but there was a time, when he was a fugitive slave, when I tried hard to find him.”5
Some journalists considered the marshal’s job in the District second in importance only to cabinet secretaries, while others thought it largely symbolic. But the symbolism of a black man selected by the president carried broad significance. News of the appointment had “spread with astonishing rapidity among the negroes of the South,” reported the Chicago Evening Journal. “Every surviving victim of the bull-dozing [violence and terror] sees therein assurance of protection.” Such firsts were a big deal in the uncertain racial atmosphere of post-Reconstruction America. A New Jersey paper put wish fulfillment ahead of reality with the headline “Color Line Abolished.” One New York paper gushed that Douglass was “the ablest negro produced in the United States . . . the negro longest in the public eye . . . nearly a Negro Washington, except in deeds of arms.” A Michigan paper declared that a new day had arrived in the national capital: “An ex-slave is now marshal of that old Babylonian city. Verily Babylon has fallen!” Old abolitionist friends rejoiced in private letters, such as Theodore Tilton in New York: “How the world wags! To me the spectacle of Frederick Douglass as marshal of the Capital . . . is a greater evidence of human progress than if I could see either Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob elected by a returning board as mayor of Jerusalem!”6
The Washington Star, which pruriently began to cover Douglass’s family almost as a kind of black first family, reported within a week of the appointment that Lewis and Frederick Jr. were hard at work answering their father’s letters of congratulations, many of which ended with pleas for jobs. Douglass now played the role of patron in more ways than one. Lewis was soon appointed as a deputy at the marshal’s office; all of his siblings would in time work there as well, or in other appointed positions, under considerable controversy. And at least one African American commentator, Fanny M. Jackson, wrote as though Douglass were what a century later might be considered the first affirmative-action appointment. She thought Douglass more than qualified, “but the idea that this distinguished man has been honored on account of his color, and that we ought to be particularly jubilant over it, is not only great nonsense, but positively harmful to us.” In language that would fit a similar debate today, she wished for transcendence of race: “If anything else but fitness has put him into this position, his appointment is simply a great . . . blunder. . . . It is just this sort of skin-deep qualification for superior advantages and honors that we have been fighting all our days.”7 As the author of some of the most searching analyses of race and racism in the nineteenth century, the new federal officeholder must have observed all these opinions with wry smiles.
One of the most trenchant responses to Douglass’s elevation to marshal came from the pen of Sara Jane Lippincott (known by her pen name Grace Greenwood). A journalist who had cut a wide literary path since the early 1850s, when she was the copy editor of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as it was serialized at the National Era, Greenwood later became the first woman on the staff of the New York Times, and one of the first to gain access to the press galleries of the US Capitol. Greenwood wrote with sarcasm and celebration about Douglass’s appointment. She lampooned the opposition as cowardly “bitter society dogs” who could be seen “barking at the enemy around the corner,” and who “yelped themselves hoarse and fell into spasms of color-phobia.” After exhausting all their excuses for opposing Douglass, said Greenwood, the haughty lawyers were left only with their one “real objection”—he was not a white man. An admirer of Douglass’s writing, Greenwood defended the former slave’s peculiar education with a flourish of portraiture.8
Greenwood argued that living in racist America had provided Douglass’s education. His adroitness at leadership had been forged in “Freedom’s High School of politics.” Douglass inspired these kinds of physical and aesthetic descriptions throughout his career. Greenwood fashioned one of the best, finding in his visage a “courtly grace” and a raw power that took her inevitably to Othello. “Not that he need say,” wrote Greenwood, so she said it for him: “Haply, for I am black / And have not those soft parts of conversations / That chamberers have.” Greenwood bitingly declared that Douglass’s enemies managed only “envious vulgarity” and saw “in his genius and culture only opportunities to wound and insult him.” She saw “Othello’s visage in his mind” and captured three and a half decades of Douglass’s encounter with white-American racial resentment.9
So Othello had found a good-paying job. For his part Douglass later remembered this episode with measured perspective, writing, “An appointment to any important and lucrative office brings . . . praise and congratulation on the one hand and much abuse and disparagement on the other.” If only serving as marshal, though, had been as dramatic as becoming marshal. The marshalship gave Douglass a new kind of fame. In April, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper ran a lithograph depicting Douglass in his office greeting a line of both elderly and young black well-wishers. The stout and dignified Douglass is the epitome of respectability, while the picture is set off by a white aide behind him who cannot be bothered to stop reading his morning newspaper. Soon after taking the office, Douglass experienced yet another postslavery reunion. After forty-one years, the Harris brothers, John and Henry, with whom Fred Bailey had shared the life-altering escape plot and deep bond of friendship on the Freeland farm in 1836, discovered their old comrade. John, who had worked for years in a Baltimore shipyard, and accompanied by the son of another brother, William, followed the publicity about the famous marshal and came to Washington to see him. Henry apparently did not make the journey from the Eastern Shore. Douglass would have relished such a meeting with Henry, the one to whom he had been chained in their humiliating trek to jail in Easton.10 We can imagine the strange pleasure and discomfort of this encounter of former slaves, one an unknown dockworker, the other a national political and literary celebrity.
“Colored Citizens Paying Respects,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, April 7, 1877, lithograph. It depicts Douglass in his new job as marshal of the District of Columbia.
Douglass’s private life as well as his every public action more and more became newsworthy. As he found footing in official Washington, he began to embody a series of contradictions that both enriched and circumscribed his life. He was now the outsider who would be the insider, an anointed symbol and heroic icon of the past who still wanted to be the activist in the present. Would he grow old and lose his voice in appointed office or still be a voice of resistance and protest? Would his leadership slip into the merely emblematic or fiercely resist all forms of white supremacy? Entering his sixties, was he a figure of the past or still of the future? How would the country’s most famous former slave balance vengeance with forgiveness in this era of increasing sectional reconciliation? How would Douglass help blacks and whites remember or forget the great epoch they had just endured? How could a bureaucrat remain a radical?
The philosopher Cornel West meditated on this question of whether Douglass fell “out of touch” in his later years as he became a Republican making some “vulgar compromises.” The “freedom fighter” who shifted from “prudence to opportunism,” argues West, ended up “defanged” as the insider in Washington. West wishes Douglass might have “sided with the populist movement,” instead of embracing a political system that could “absorb him, incorporate him, diffuse his fire.” These sentiments have some veracity; Douglass had to grow old in the Gilded Age, make a living for all those around him, while embodying a living symbol as few others ever have. But Othello needed new occupations and livelihoods. He forever remade himself, and such an imperative was no less the case in post-Reconstruction America than in his earlier heroic life. Many have wished upon the old orator a sterner economic analysis of inequality, or a less triumphal advocacy of self-reliance. But he lived his life in the nineteenth century as a consummate political liberal. It further does little good to ask, with West, “Where is the voice of the early Douglass . . . as Jim Crow is developing in the 1870s and 1880s?” That voice changed and emerged less aggressively perhaps; but it never died. He kept his fangs filed on issues of racism, violence, states’ rights, and the nation’s memory. He had been Jim-Crowed so many times he quit counting. He answered such humiliations with dignity, eloquence, disobedience, and intelligence. West does consider Douglass “deeply prophetic,” a voice of wisdom beyond his time. And West acknowledges that Douglass understood that “you don’t find truth in the middle of the road; you find truth beneath the superficial, mediocre, mainstream dialogue . . . buried . . . hidden . . . and when you connect with that truth, you have to take a stand.”11 Some freedom fighters wear starched shirts, cultivate their appearance, and battle evil with words.
• • •
From 1877 into the early 1880s, Douglass only rarely left the environs of Washington, Baltimore, and other parts of Maryland or Virginia to lecture; for a while, as he reached sixty years old, no more Midwest winter tours threatened his health. In May 1877, barely a month into his tenure as marshal, he delivered a speech in Baltimore, “Our National Capital,” that caused a firestorm of reaction. He had now lived in Washington full-time for six years and knew its culture. In 1871, appointed by President Grant, Douglass had served a brief two months in the Legislative Council when the District of Columbia had territorial status. Because of his heavy speaking schedule, he resigned and his son Lewis served out the two years of the term. Douglass might have had little interest in the daily running of the District, but he became deeply concerned as Washington’s mere three years as a territory came to an abrupt end when Democrats gained control of Congress in 1874.12
Given his official position, the directness of Douglass’s statements about both the racism and the political skulduggery at the center of Gilded Age politics in 1877 was more than his enemies could bear. Initially, Douglass celebrated a transformed Washington, an urban landscape revitalized by the “vast and wonderful revolution . . . during the last dozen years.” Emancipation, the saving and remaking of the Union, had given the city new life, and the Capitol grounds themselves had been reimagined by the genius of landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. Under the Republicans’ territorial government, and especially the Board of Public Works, led by Alexander Shepherd, thoroughfares and parks had replaced the prewar squalor with beauty and promise. The board spent a great deal of money on urban improvements, including new housing and schools for a city that had become one-third black.13
The city was still awash too often in a “cant of patriotism,” in Douglass’s view. But a promising new brand of postwar nationalism reigned. With his hopeful hat on, Douglass declared that “men of all races, colors, and conditions . . . [were] thrilled with the sentiment of equal citizenship and common country.” The costs and sorrows of the war still hung all over the city, but so did the new nation’s “trophies and her monuments . . . her witnesses are a free country, a united country, and emancipated millions forever redeemed from the horror of slavery.” Douglass announced his own sense of belonging, as he also delivered a full-throated embrace of the centralization of power in the federal government. He denounced the states’ rights doctrines emanating from the Democratic Party and the federal courts as a path to “disorganization and disorder.” Then he slipped his cynical hat on and spoke for the remaining two-thirds of the address about the differences between what “ought to be” and the historical “reality” of the federal city.14
Douglass identified “disgraceful and scandalous contradictions” all around. He made an argument for home rule for residents of the District of Columbia, observing that apart from women, they were the only Americans disenfranchised. Above all he fashioned a social analysis of the class divisions and prewar proslavery as well as postwar white supremacy in the capital’s political culture. He argued that the national capital should never have been moved from Philadelphia, since Washington was and always had been too pro-Southern. He skewered all brands of “lobbyists” and “spoilsmen.”15
With unabashed caricature he put his hatred of the slaveholding South on full satirical display. Although diminished in stature since the war, the “old slaveholding stock of Virginia and Maryland” were still visible in the capital in pursuit of “Uncle Sam’s good things” with “leisurely indolence.” The Washingtonian of Southern background was “never in a hurry . . . his gait is slow . . . his arms dangle,” since his “muscles have had little to do.” Douglass warmed to his prey. The Southern man possessed the “sitting power of a Turk,” always “toying with a cane . . . as a badge of authority.” This living relic tilted his hat lower than most over his eyes since he could not abide a “manly openness of character.” Most telling, the white Washingtonian of Southern influence had “something of the negro in his speech.” Here Douglass anticipated by almost a century Ralph Ellison’s observations about an “American language” that had always evolved as a “vernacular revolt . . . merging the sounds of many tongues.” Whether acknowledged or not, said Ellison, “that language is derived from the timbre of the African voice and the listening habits of the African ear.” “Slave speech” sounded beneath “Harvard accents, and if there is such a thing as a Yale accent, there is a Negro wail in it—doubtlessly introduced there by Old Yalie John C. Calhoun, who probably got it from his mammy.” Douglass had reached the same position. “Born and reared among negro slaves,” he said, “learning their first songs and stories from their lips, they [whites] have naturally enough adopted the negro’s manner of using his vocal organs.” Douglass relished the “consolation” that “if blacks are too low to learn from the whites, the whites are not too high to learn from the blacks.”16
No one was safe from Douglass’s acid satire, especially the “whirlpools of social driftwood” who floated into the capital as office seekers and thrived on the “buncombe” of political transactions. This included black “place hunters” who stalked Douglass and any other black men of prominence. “Get to Washington and find Douglass” was their battle cry. From white supplicants he had realized that there were “a great many more Underground Railroad Stations at the North than I ever dreamed of when I sorely needed one myself.” He lampooned the District’s large supply of “poor white trash,” who before the war were “generally on hand when a refractory negro was to be beaten,” and they “would follow the track of a negro as a dog will follow a bone, or a shark will follow a slave ship.” Since the war, this class all but lived to “resent the emancipation” and tried to find occupations “by hunting, gunning, fishing, and huckstering.” His evisceration of lobbyists and corruption all but did Mark Twain one better. Washington, according to Douglass, attracted more than its share of vice and crime, especially prostitution. Above all, the capital had simply never risen above its poisoned past of slavery and racism; every man of standing, black or white, seemed to require a “black boy” to do everything for the “boss,” who wielded the whip on “the horse, the ox, the mule, or the boy.”17 Douglass’s satirical voice had never been in better form.
This remarkable speech entertained his biracial Baltimore audience in May 1877, but as excerpts appeared in national papers, calls for Douglass’s political head rang out. Petitions circulated in the capital (allegedly they reached a total of twenty thousand signatures) demanding that President Hayes remove Douglass from office. The Washington Star called his appointment as marshal a mistake. Some influential blacks, especially John Mercer Langston, disassociated themselves from Douglass’s parodies of white Washingtonians. Under several days of headlines such as “An Insulted City,” the National Republican ran many pages of commentary on Douglass’s notorious speech, calling it a “gratuitous and stupid insult” to the city. The Washington Chronicle called for him to step down, and the Gazette, a Democratic paper, characterized Douglass as an “inspired liar,” a “dirty befouler,” and an ungrateful “pet lamb” of the Republicans. Another paper wrote that Douglass, the “blatant blatherskite,” got away with his slanders only because he was black.18
Douglass responded as best he could to these condemnations. His office was in the District of Columbia City Hall, where on May 12 he was confronted by a reporter who asked him to confirm or deny parts of the speech. Douglass responded that he had been “misquoted,” and that “all the good . . . words of commendation for the city and its residents” had not been reported. The defensive marshal wrote public letters in at least four newspapers, denying that he had slandered anyone while reinforcing his claim that white Washingtonians had absorbed “negro pronunciation” and “negro manner.” Still, he felt astonished at the “tempest of rage,” said he was “not ashamed of a single sentence,” and especially lashed back at his black critics.19 By June, the controversy had blown over, and the prurient press’s favorite black celebrity left town on a special journey.
• • •
Douglass was a proud man—proud of his fame, his tailored suits, his books, his cultivated mastery of language, his physical image in photographs, his position in the government. In April 1877, Harper’s Weekly ran a lithograph of a Douglass photograph, showing the bearded iconic face from a left profile. That same year he sat for a stunning Mathew Brady photograph in Washington. By 1883 he appeared famously on the cover of Harper’s. But he never stopped searching to unravel the mystery behind his highly visible life: how a barefoot slave boy on the Wye plantation ever made it to lecture halls in London and Edinburgh, or how a wretched teenager in rags in the Talbot County courthouse jail ever made it to the White House to discuss emancipation with Lincoln. Douglass could never entirely believe his own myth even as he forged it; often he asked himself, How did I get here? In mid-June 1877 he decided for the first time in forty-one years to return to the Eastern Shore, to St. Michaels, and to meet with an aging and infirm Thomas Auld. Douglass had spent much of his public life seeking and explaining vengeance; but retribution alone was not enough. By the late 1870s he still desperately sought knowledge of his patrimony, his birthday, the meaning of his roots in what was once a place of pain and among relationships he would recall with “extremest abhorrence.” He was a genius at fashioning his story of ascendance, but also forever in search of a lost past that might allow him a stable psychic peace.20 For complex reasons he also needed to exercise some forgiveness. Public vengeance and distrust for the slaveholding South lived in Douglass alongside a solicitude for the people who had owned him. Only in immersing himself in that contradiction could he truly gain self-knowledge.
In Baltimore, at Fell’s Point, Douglass boarded the steamer Matilda for an overnight trip down the Chesapeake Bay, the water highway that had carried so many of his dreams. On board the two-hundred-foot stern-wheeler were approximately a hundred blacks, like Douglass on a brief holiday. The ship had no real accommodations, and Douglass reportedly found the behavior of his fellow passengers appalling. With banjos strumming, dancing ensued, liquor bottles were passed; revelers made loud noise all night and relieved themselves over the deck railings. With his sense of racial pride and class dignity insulted, the Baltimore Sun recorded Douglass complaining that “100 colored people aboard made as much noise as 500 whites would have done.” In his speech made at a picnic ground in St. Michaels a day later, he preached to the blacks assembled, “We must not talk about equality until we can do what white people can do. As long as they can build vessels and we cannot, we are their inferiors. . . . As long as they can found governments and we cannot, we are their inferiors.”21 This harsh language flowed from Douglass when he felt embarrassed by some of his people. At this stage of life, his class status seemed easily offended. Such were the contradictions of his chosen path of leadership. The paragon of respectability found some of the fun-loving habits of the recently emancipated unsavory. Douglass much preferred violins to banjos.
When Douglass arrived in St. Michaels, he found a town where most blacks still lived in shacks and their economic conditions had not changed much since the end of slavery. A crowd of blacks and whites followed him as he strolled through streets. Many came up to shake his hand, and although his sister Eliza was not among them, a group of younger Mitchells (her extended family) and other kinfolk joined the impromptu parade. In this sleepy oyster-harvesting and boatbuilding town, Douglass must have appeared like some tall, leonine, white-haired African ruler returning in Western clothing. He later called this homecoming “strange enough in itself,” but that he was about to meet his former master was “still more strange.” A messenger brought word that Auld had agreed to see him at the home of the old man’s daughter and son-in-law, Louisa and William H. Bruff. The gawking entourage followed him to the corner of Cherry Street and Locust Lane, where, as Dickson Preston, our best chronicler of Douglass’s returns to the Eastern Shore, wrote, “It was the first time that a black man had ever entered a white home in St. Michaels by the front door, as an honored guest.”22
Auld was sick, bedridden, his hands “palsied,” as Douglass described him. The two men met for about twenty minutes in an emotional, humane encounter of past and present. Douglass thought he was witnessing Auld on his deathbed, although the former slaveowner would not die for two and a half more years. As autobiographer, Douglass re-created this drama with a customary vividness and irony. He entitled the chapter “Time Makes All Things Even”; he did not say time cures all ills, nor had he “begged” for Auld’s “forgiveness,” as the Baltimore Sun’s reporter claimed. But he may have revealed a deep yearning to heal his own soul, to find a purging of his scarred memory, to forgive in a way that helped him to finally declare publicly his survival and triumph. In much of Christian tradition—in which Douglass had learned to think and write—the forgiver often forgives for his own sake, not to excuse the oppressor. He forgives to strengthen his own heart, to work through grief, pain, loss, and hatred. Douglass had striven long and far and come to see that some self-understanding may rest at the end of the precept “Forgive, and ye shall be forgiven.”23 Former slave met former owner, but Douglass needed this meeting most.
In part, Douglass used the reunion to try to demonstrate a changed country as measured in his own life. Auld had “made property to my body and soul,” wrote the memoirist, “reduced me to a chattel, hired me out to a noted slave-breaker to be worked like a beast and flogged into submission.” In turn, Douglass had traveled the world, making his old master’s “name and his deeds familiar . . . in four different languages” as the symbol of all that was evil in American slavery. For so many years Douglass had wreaked a prophetic vengeance on slavery, slaveholders, the Confederacy, their memory, and all they stood for. Now, in a bedroom of an old brick house in St. Michaels, Maryland, nearby where Auld had whipped Fred Bailey and rented him down the road to Edward Covey, it was as if the aging Douglass glimpsed his own mortality and his own frail humanity way down beneath all the brilliant antislavery rhetoric. Douglass irresistibly went to the sick man’s bedside and suddenly found himself “holding his [Auld’s] hand and in friendly conversation with him in a sort of final settlement of past differences preparatory to his stepping into his grave, where all distinctions are at an end, and where the great and the small, the slave and his master, are reduced to the same level.”24
So Douglass went to St. Michaels to declare his equality, and in a way to practice a self-renewing forgiveness. He was the one dispensing the equality. With words, he was trying to bury slavery once and for all in the very soil of his birth. The entire nation’s sins were still in desperate need of remission. “He was to me no longer a slaveholder either in fact or in spirit,” wrote the famous black man of the obscure white man, “and I regarded him as I did myself, a victim of the circumstances of birth, education, law, and custom.” Their mutual fates had been “determined for us, not by us.” Douglass the avenger changed his tune as both men shed tears, one of them with hand trembling, and “ready to step into the eternal unknown.” Douglass, the former war propagandist, recalled, “Even the constancy of hate breaks down . . . before the brightness of infinite light.” He had long needed breaks from hating. The two men talked about the past. Auld called the younger man “Marshal Douglass,” and the former slave called the older man “Captain Auld.” But Douglass interrupted and insisted, “Not Marshal, but Frederick to you as formerly.” The scene later caused a swirl of protest among younger blacks, since it was reported in papers as “just call me Fred.” This made the former slave look as though he had kowtowed to the former slaveholder; a cartoon even appeared showing Douglass kneeling as he approached Auld.25
Douglass was keenly interested in what Auld thought of his running away, to which the old denizen of Methodist camp meetings answered, “Frederick, I always knew you were too smart to be a slave.” Douglass assured Auld that he had not run away from “you, but from slavery; it was not that I loved Caesar less, but Rome more.” Douglass apologized for his former charge that Auld had put his grandmother Betsy out to die. That had been, Douglass admitted, “a mistake in my narrative.” Finally, the former Fred Bailey of mysterious patrimony even asked Auld if he could determine his [Douglass’s] birth year, to which the old master replied, 1818, making his guest a year younger than he had realized. That “destitution” of never knowing his birthday was now at least partially assuaged. Just why and how Auld knew the year so readily remains part of the mystery.26
Douglass took such care with this account in Life and Times, he maintained, because his ever-ready critics—the “heartless triflers”—had made mischief out of his return to St. Michaels. He tried to set the record straight. But he also needed to know if the shabby surroundings of the Eastern Shore could quiet the noise in his soul, help him to discover just who he was now that he had transcended Covey’s farm for Washington’s City Hall. Douglass visited the palsied Auld to see whether a qualified forgiveness for one slaveowner could still his rage against all of them. This search for self-knowledge, however, did not in the least diminish his embrace of self-help doctrines. In his outdoor speech that afternoon, he declared himself a lover of Maryland, a proud “Eastern Shoreman,” and above all, he urged the poorer black folk to “get money and keep it” and thereby demand self-respect.27 As the visit to the Eastern Shore demonstrated, the famous Douglass now lived a life of constant conflict between public and private imperatives. He needed the beatitudes for his own quiet reasons.
A year and a half later, in the late fall of 1878, Douglass returned a second time to the Eastern Shore. Invited by the local Republican Party for a paid lecture, he went to speak at the Talbot County Courthouse, where he had been jailed for plotting to escape in 1836, as well as at the Bethel and Asbury AME Churches. This time he journeyed aboard an overnight steamer, Highland Light, on which he broke a color line by staying in a stateroom. The visit to Easton became a kind of celebrity’s welcome. Breaking yet another color barrier, Douglass stayed at the Brick Hotel, the town’s finest, and took meals at Lowe’s Tavern, just across the street from where he and the Harris brothers had been jailed in chains, and where forty-five years earlier he had witnessed tobacco-chewing, gazing slave traders groping and sizing up their prey. The former slave relished all these ironies; the old prison metaphors of the Narrative gave way in Life and Times to new rushes of memory: “There stood the old jail, with its white-washed walls and iron gratings, as when in my youth I heard its heavy locks and bolts clank behind me.” The nearly eighty-year old Joseph Graham, former sheriff of Talbot County and the man who had locked Douglass in that jail so long ago, attended the lecture in the courthouse, welcoming the former inmate and shaking his hand.28
High-altitude aerial view of Bay Hundred with Kent Island and Poplar Island and Western Shore, c. 1930. The expanse of Chesapeake Bay is in the distance.
All eyes in Easton were on the tall, sixty-year-old man with the large crop of gray hair, as he strolled the streets that had been so forbidden in his youth. An Easton Gazette reporter seemed to follow Douglass everywhere, describing a “large man of full habit, but not obese . . . his color that of a bright mulatto . . . his features not at all those of a Negro, except that there is a slight depression of the nose and spreading of the nostrils.” The two black congregations of Bethel and Asbury gathered to hear the returning hero on the Sunday afternoon, November 24. On Monday, to a racially mixed audience crowded into the courthouse, Douglass gave a modified version of “Self-Made Men.” His speech, according to the one account, came with two stern messages—prescriptions for self-help and hard work for blacks, and for whites his old plea to give the freedman “fair play” and then “let him alone.” To the whites he further demanded that they “not form your Ku Klux Klan and your rifle clubs to drive him [the Negro] from the polls.” The Gazette reporter thought the lecture had “thrilled every bosom.”29
Perhaps the most poignant moment in that evening’s speech came when Douglass described his daytime journey in a hired rig out to Tappers Corner, and the walk through fields of the farm once owned by Aaron Anthony, to the horseshoe bend in the Tuckahoe River, searching for the exact location of his birth. Louis Freeman, a local former slave who had once lived on that same farm, accompanied Douglass. The two of them studied the landscape and found a long gulley leading up from the river; here was what Douglass had once remembered as the “ravine.” Grandma Betsy’s cabin was long gone, as was the old well. Douglass trudged into the briars and brush looking for an old cedar tree. There it was, grown much larger than in his boyhood; he believed he had found the spot. Douglass knelt in solitude and reverence and with bare hands scooped up handfuls of soil to take back with him to his Washington home.30
That night in the lecture, he told the assembled that he had obtained “some of the very soil on which I first trod.” With some of Talbot County’s dirt, Douglass now had a sacred talisman—to observe or touch, or perhaps even smell—when he needed to reflect on the meaning of his double life on both sides of the Chesapeake. Through his senses, it might have given him a way to pay homage to his mother and grandmother, to the blood and toil they had left in that soil. In the Narrative Douglass told us he had no recollection of seeing his “mother by the light of day.” In Bondage and Freedom, his more lengthy attempt to remember his mother could end only with “her grave is, as the grave of the dead at sea, unmarked, and without stone or stake.”31 Bowing down on the ground where his life began, his hands shoving aside the late-November leaves, and pushing down into the cold soil, may have been for Douglass a profoundly private way of recognizing how unsettling, unfinished, and even unattainable the story of his life truly remained. That soil provided, though, one kind of fact he had come to the Eastern Shore to find. Harriet Bailey was there somewhere; and so was he.
Before leaving the Eastern Shore, Douglass paid a visit to Charleston, to the south in Dorchester County, the area where Harriet Tubman had hailed from. He reconnected once again with his brother Perry, now old and infirm. Douglass took Perry back to Washington with him, and until Perry died less than two years later, he lived with the Douglasses among the growing household clan. Pointing to this touching fact, an Easton Gazette reporter struggled to capture the remarkable contrasts of Douglass’s visit. Calling the story “wonderful,” the Gazette fashioned a memory of it to fit both reality and mythology: “He left our county under compulsion. . . . He comes back by invitation . . . not to ask pardon of those whom he had disobeyed, but to extend pardon to those by whom he had been wronged. He left as a fugitive. . . . He comes back our equal before law.” As if white Marylanders could now claim Douglass in the present by erasing his past, the paper concluded, “He left us a ‘nigger,’ he returns a gentleman.”32 With a bag full of soil and his older brother, the marshal hurried back to the District of Columbia.
• • •
By the end of the 1870s, Douglass thrived, at least symbolically, at the center of American political life. He continued in the mundane tasks of the marshal’s office, but what he dealt with daily were the vicissitudes of fame, constant criticism, and controversy. Douglass is a distinctive example of the nature of fame in nineteenth-century America. His was a fame of achievement, the celebrated American self-made variety. This fame was enmeshed with the country’s most compelling story of slavery, its destruction, and new visions of freedom about which he was a prominent author. But his was also, as the historian Leo Braudy writes, a “visible . . . modern fame” that emerged in the age of “the rapid growth of newspapers and magazines, the development of the railroad and the telegraph, along with the rapid sophistication of photography.”33 Douglass was a lover and student of photography, which he cultivated as a means of spreading his influence through his image.
Over more than fifty years, 1841–1894, Douglass sat for approximately 160 photographs and wrote some four essays or addresses that were in part about the craft and meaning of pictures. In engravings and lithographs his image graced the pages or cover of all major illustrated papers in England and the United States. His picture was captured in all major forms of photography, from the daguerreotype to stereographs and wet-plate albumen prints. Photographers, some famous and some not, all across the country sought out Douglass for his image. As the historians of his image have shown, the orator performed for the camera. He especially presented himself without props, his own stunning person representing African American “masculinity and citizenship.” He helped to choose the frontispieces for his autobiographies, which carried his photograph, and he especially sought to create for a wide audience successive images of the intelligent, dignified black man, and statesmanlike elite, at the same time he understood that photography had evolved into a “democratic art,” allowing almost anyone to leave an image for posterity.34 Visually, by the 1870s and 1880s, Douglass was one of the most recognizable Americans; the dissemination of photographs of him became, therefore, a richly political act. Loved and hated, along with the living Grant and the mythic Lincoln, he was the American story, and he put a face on it.
Douglass instinctively loved politics and debate and never lacked for opinions. He continued to preach unapologetically to blacks about self-reliance. In February 1878, at an unveiling of a print of Francis Bicknell Carpenter’s famous painting, First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation, at Howard University, where Douglass served as a trustee, and in the presence of President Hayes and other dignitaries, Douglass stressed the necessity of blacks learning to “build ships [and] domes,” as the path to social respect. These kinds of remarks brought steady chastisement from some quarters. By early 1879 an Elmira, New York, paper accused Douglass of believing “nothing can be done” in the face of the collapse of Hayes’s policy of conciliation and the South’s increased violence and discrimination against blacks. The editorialist claimed Douglass had “settled down in his old age” in a comfortable federal office, counseling his people to “suffer and wait. . . . This is not the tone of his olden speech. . . . It is sad to see such a transformation.” Douglass had become pathetic, said his former allies, a mere “small voice for peace.”35 They got the old radical’s attention.
Douglass wrote an angry letter to the Elmira Advertiser. “I never said nothing can be done,” he roared, calling for “moral indignation” and investigations of Southern conditions. They had wounded him. “When the influence of office or any other influence shall soften my hatred of tyranny and violence do not spare me; let fall upon me the lash of your keenest and most withering censure.” He received plenty of censure, even from old comrades such as Samuel Porter in Rochester, who cautioned him about losing his moral bearings as a political insider. Douglass responded with this metaphoric assurance of his integrity: “Thanks for your gentle warning. . . . The perils are abundant in every part of the voyage of life—and are as abundant when nearing the shore as when in mid ocean. I can only promise to keep a man at the ‘mast head’ and a sharp look out and a firm hand on the helm.”36
Despite all these challenges, Douglass continued to carry the “Self-Made Men” lecture all over the American map. A typical example is a trip he made out to Staunton, Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley in April 1879. As so often happened with these events, a brass band and large delegation met Douglass at the depot and escorted him first to a hotel, where local worthies called upon him, and then to Augusta Street Methodist Church. The sanctuary was filled to the rafters, reported the Valley Virginian, to see the “bright mulatto” orator. The middle pews were reserved for some two hundred white people, with the City Council sitting up front. Blacks sat around the sides and in a balcony. A black “Jubilee Choir” sang, and then Douglass held forth for two and a half hours, performing, according to the local reporter, routines and arguments intended to entertain and please the whites.37 He allowed the white town fathers to feel proud of their Christian paternalism, as long as they exercised it with benevolence.
Anticipating in style and substance some of what Booker T. Washington would later make legendary, Douglass prescribed self-reliance for the balcony and peace and economic cooperation for the middle pews. “These negroes are among you and will remain with you,” declared Douglass to the Virginians. Then came the Indian analogy, devoid of any attention to the murder and mass displacement of Native peoples under way at that very moment. “You need not expect them to die out like the Indians. They are too fond of civilizing influences. . . . An Indian is contented with a blanket, while a negro’s ambition is a swallow-tailed coat; the Indians don’t like churches and steeples, while the negro thinks the higher the steeple the nearer they are to heaven.” Douglass urged the Staunton whites to embrace their sturdy black neighbors in economic and political harmony. “They [blacks] are essentially imitative, and if by their efforts they seek to raise themselves from poverty and attain to the excellence of good citizenship, give them a chance. Don’t place unnecessary obstacles in their way; let them alone, and if they die out let them die. . . . Sell them lands and let them practice your economy and thrift.”38 Such rhetoric may have worked in making the middle pews in a Southern church feel a social peace on a spring afternoon. But out in the larger society at that very moment a different, desperate movement had taken hold.
In the spring and through the summer of 1879, Kansas fever, an “exodus” impulse, spread over the desperately poor tenant farming blacks of the states of Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. The urge to migrate to better conditions, with the dream of land ownership and economic independence, had risen and fallen in parts of the South ever since emancipation. But by the spring of 1879, a perfect storm of causes and inducements coalesced to prompt approximately six thousand freedpeople and their children to head for the banks of the Mississippi River in search of steamboats. They were driven by a combination of tenant-farming debt and economic despair since the depression of 1873. Most worked on “shares” of their cotton in a cash-poor economy, faced extortion practiced by landowners and furnishing merchants, and a resurgence of “bulldozing,” the night-riding violence against black cummunities. They further set hopeful eyes on Kansas because of some political promises of federal financial assistance made by their remaining Republican allies in the US Congress. And for many desperate people, a millenarian religious impulse pushed them to the horizons seeking a new dispensation from God on their Kansas Exodus to a promised land—not of milk and honey, but of property ownership and flourishing schools in their own black-run towns a long way from pharaoh’s night riders.39
The Kansas Exodus received enormous press attention around the country and was fiercely debated among black leaders and their allies, even as some white Southerners lowered rents on their tenants, frightened that they might lose their laborers. Should agricultural black Southerners leave the homes and lands they had always known and worked? Fed up with betrayal, political exclusion, and terror, many black leaders urged on the Exodus, raised money, and demanded the government help finance and protect the migration. President Hayes’s policy of conciliation toward the South in return for promises of reform, peace, and protection of black rights from Southern Democrats had failed disastrously; indeed, Democrats took control of both houses of Congress in the elections of 1878, and the Republican Party was a dying institution in the former Confederacy. Hayes put faith in the long-term effects of education and urged blacks to learn “industry, self-reliance, self control, economy and thrift.” To a black educator in Florida considering migration to the Midwest in July 1879, Hayes urged, “Stay where you are. . . . You are natives of the South and you are entitled to remain there. I know you are assaulted and bulldozed, but stick. Time and the North will set you right.” In such pathetic terms, Hayes had given up on any real federal protection for the freedmen.40 On the Exodus, with different reasoning, Douglass essentially agreed with the president.
The Exodus inspired an extremely divisive debate. “I never found myself more . . . painfully at variance with leading colored men of the country,” Douglass wrote just two years later, “than when I opposed the effort to set in motion a wholesale exodus of colored people.” In 1878 he reiterated that he had always, abstractly, seen such schemes of emigration as “a delusion and a scam. The white race is everywhere on the face of the globe and we could not get away from them if we would.” Especially agonizing for Douglass were claims made by fellow blacks that he “had deserted to the old master class” and become “a traitor to my race.” At a mass meeting about the Exodus in New York in late April 1879, attended by an array of black and white former abolitionists, Douglass was loudly hissed when he was announced to speak in opposition to the Kansas movement. He responded in speeches and with letters to his critics in the press. He angrily wrote to the People’s Advocate of Washington after that paper accused him of “turning a deaf ear to the sufferings” of the Exodusters: “You could hardly make a more grievous charge against me, and let me therefore ask you for the evidence upon which it is based. . . . The reputation of colored public men built up by long years of public service should not be wantonly thrown away.” But this debate functioned less on evidence than on racial solidarity and despair at Reconstruction’s failure. Blacks everywhere fiercely disputed whether the South had become an irredeemable Egypt or a promised land still worth fighting for. Douglass was especially wounded by critics who called him a “fawning sycophant” who abandoned his people.41
A target now for many disappointments among black leadership in the Gilded Age, Douglass tried to fight back. With few exceptions, such as Blanche K. Bruce and P. B. S. Pinchback, black Southern politicians who opposed mass immigration from Louisiana or Mississippi, Douglass stood virtually alone as the major opponent of the Exodus. His celebrity brought perhaps inordinate attention to his opinions. Black Southern politicians favored the Exodus in varying ways. So did the legendary Sojourner Truth, who went to Kansas herself and lent moral support to the migrants. Northern black leaders who had long been either friends or rivals of Douglass’s, such as George T. Downing, Richard T. Greener, and John Mercer Langston, all became vocal advocates of the Exodus. Douglass held open public debates with Langston and Greener. Douglass further came under censure in state-level black conventions, such as one in Nashville, Tennessee, in May 1879, where the Kentucky-born Ohio State legislator Robert J. Harlan (a half brother of Supreme Court justice John M. Harlan) argued in a widely reprinted speech that the South had collapsed into “another Egypt” and that emigration westward was the freedpeople’s only remedy.42
Douglass fired some angry salvos in a speech in Baltimore in May 1879, where he vigorously rejected the equivalencies drawn by some Exodus advocates between prewar chattel slavery and the current plight of the freedpeople. He renewed his long-practiced loathing of “schemes of colonization and emigration,” which he believed had historically hurt black people. Moreover, in a piece in the National View, Douglass laid out ten reasons why he was opposed to this exodus. His arguments boiled down to the idea that blacks, however poor or scorned, should never give up on the revolution of emancipation, not offer an “untimely concession” to white racism, and never surrender on the achievement of equality. By November, Douglass was still devoting enormous time to point-by-point attempts in newspapers to refute Langston or others.43
Douglass wrote a lengthy paper on the Exodus in September 1879 at the invitation of the American Social Science Association. He was to appear in a point-counterpoint debate with Richard T. Greener, Harvard’s first black graduate, dean of the Howard University law school, and a cantankerous intellectual nemesis of Douglass’s. At the last minute Douglass did not travel to Saratoga Springs, New York, in September to the association’s annual meeting; the address was read for him by Francis Wayland III, professor and dean of the Yale Law School. In this carefully crafted essay, later published with Greener’s rejoinder, Douglass first demonstrated a sympathetic understanding of the economic plight of black Southerners and why they would feel entitled to their right to emigrate. He delivered a robust, if somewhat naïve, analysis of the South’s dependence on black labor: black brawn and skill had always been the “admitted author of whatever prosperity, beauty and civilization . . . possessed by the South . . . the arbiter of her destiny.” The freedman, Douglass argued, in defiance of much evidence, had a “monopoly on the labor market” and with “no competitors . . . he can demand living prices with the certainty that the demand will be complied with.” How dearly so many desperate sharecroppers wished they had some control over such a bargain. Naïvely, Douglass sustained his faith in the triumph of free labor and universal manhood suffrage. It was as though the busy marshal-orator had thrown up a psychological wall of denial in his mind about the reality of racial oppression in the South. He believed all successful people and cultures must have a “native land.” A “wandering” people, in his view, only garnered collective disrespect.44
But at its heart the Saratoga address was a plea against what the Washington insider deemed a “surrender, a premature, disheartening surrender” of the great causes of the Civil War era: abolitionism, emancipation, the Reconstruction amendments, equal rights, independence and self-reliance, and the US government’s responsibility of protection and enforcement. In Douglass’s logic, the Exodus was an abandonment of all worthy principles; it was victory turned into “a miserable compromise” or, worse, into slow defeat of the second American republic. Leaving the South meant that in the long run the Confederacy had won. Douglass demanded that blacks stay and fight, with their labor and especially their votes. The “possibility of power,” he argued, existed only where blacks could sustain large populations, breed their own officeholders, and prevail at the ballot box. It was as if Douglass counseled a million desperate tenant farmers who had watched some of their kinfolk brutalized or murdered trying to vote to bide their time and stay and fight for the dream of political liberalism. Douglass had always hated the arguments at the base of colonization schemes. The Exodus was to him, therefore, an “apostleship of despair” that the old orator in the Oberlin tent in 1848, from Corinthian Hall’s stage in 1852, or on the altar of Tremont Temple in 1863 and a thousand other venues just could not abide.45 But a tide of history had swept over his cherished principles and left them in tatters.
No matter the depth of their misery, humiliation, or hopelessness, Douglass urged black Southerners to stay put and keep fighting. In effect, he asked poor farmers who despaired of their future to take a long view and to carry the weight of his version of the nation’s memory and history. At stake was the very integrity of his own story and that of Union victory. The animating center of a series of twelve resolutions against the Exodus that he prepared for a public gathering in Hillsdale, District of Columbia, in the summer of 1879 was his claim that mass migration now meant “the late rebellion will have triumphed . . . the rebel South will have been exalted.”46 So Douglass stood his ground, flailed away at bitter reality, and insisted that history, against the odds, stay on course. Those poor farmers caught up in migration fever, however, were not playing for history; they needed safety, their own land, an escape from the furnishing merchant, and hope.
Douglass was not merely “blind” and out of touch, as some biographers have contended.47 He found himself in a position, a decade and a half after emancipation, not unlike many leaders of the modern civil rights movement. They have to fight to protect political and constitutional triumphs, as well as a new national historical memory, while they also face a deepening crisis of structural repression and inequality. Douglass’s story, when he was heroically right as well as disappointingly wrong, was a rehearsal for the long haul of postemancipation and post–civil rights black and progressive leadership who have encountered foes as virulent as the Democratic Party’s Southern Redeemers of the 1870s and much of the Republican Party in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
• • •
With a $6,000 loan in 1878 from a black friend and former abolitionist Robert Purvis, Douglass purchased Cedar Hill, a house on a fifteen-acre estate on the heights in Anacostia in the southeast part of the District of Columbia. He and Anna, and parts of the extended family, moved permanently to the estate in 1878. Some forty yards or so out behind the big house, beyond the lawn where friends and family played croquet, Douglass constructed his “growlery,” a small single-room stone structure complete with a writing desk and a chaise longue. At times the desk may have been that of Charles Sumner, a keepsake the black leader had received upon the senator’s death in 1874. He borrowed the name for his writer’s retreat from Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. In the novel, Mr. Jarndyce established such a “little library of books and papers” as the “refuge” in which he hid when “out of humor,” the place “I come and growl.” When besieged by his large extended family of adult children, growing numbers of grandchildren, siblings real and fictive, his increasingly sickly wife, and assorted others, Douglass escaped to his growlery.48 Major parts of the first edition of Life and Times, published in 1881, were likely written there. His effort to order and control time in his final memoir masks the hidden pressures and dilemmas of his personal life. In that realm, about which he wrote so little, Douglass experienced plenty of pain and frustration about which to growl.
As 1880 arrived, Douglass’s personal life at Cedar Hill remained a roiling hub of family joy, domestic comfort, and turmoil. The continuing financial and career struggles of his sons and his daughter, as they began to reach early middle age with growing families, is the subtext for Douglass’s steadfast views on black self-reliance, migration, property, the work ethic, and other values. All around him at every turn he saw necessity, striving, failure, dependence, contradiction, and more than twenty grandchildren, whom he hoped would live into the next century in a modern, more enlightened America. The personal and the public were thoroughly intertwined in every day of the aging Douglass’s life. In speeches, such as the one he gave at a black agricultural exposition in Raleigh, North Carolina, in October 1880, one hears echoes of his family’s travails: the “greatest want” of blacks is “regular and lucrative employments”; they should acquire property and save money. The “want of money,” Douglass repeatedly declared to black workers and farmers, “is the root of very many evils.” It may seem harsh to us today, but in this period of racial subjugation, he maintained that blacks were despised more for their “poverty” than for their “color.”49
New life constantly flowed in and out of the universe of Cedar Hill and the Douglass clan, as Anna Murray Douglass became sometimes debilitated by illness. Douglass reported to Amy Post in April 1879 that his financial situation had nearly “touched bottom.” He had “three families to support,” including three of “Rosa’s children . . . part of Charley’s whose wife is dead, and my old sick brother Perry and his daughter.” Death began to visit with regularity, sometimes in natural course and sometimes with shocking alarm. Charles, who was once again unemployed, with his two children, Freddie and Joseph, eleven and nine years old, moved in with his brother Frederick Jr. in November. The situation must have been tense and difficult; Frederick Jr. reported in handwritten notes in the scrapbooks he assembled that the two children “were taken away by their father” on January 3, 1881, after Charles secured a job with the US Census Bureau. Moreover, on August 18, 1880, Douglass’s half brother Perry Downs died at Cedar Hill at age sixty-seven and was buried the following day in the Hillsdale cemetery.50 Many more funerals would soon be performed and planned from Cedar Hill.
Into the early 1880s Ottilie Assing remained occasionally in Douglass’s life, and often in his correspondence. With keen desire she awaited her less regular “orders,” as she put it, to come to Washington for extended visits. Some stays in Washington, she told her correspondents, were truncated or burdened by the constant flow of cousins, grandchildren, and other “parasites” pursuing her beloved Douglass. She unabashedly complained that son Charles was still “on the dole” in 1878 and that the family whirlwind around Cedar Hill was “uncivilized.” She never seems to have commented on the sheer challenge of all the grandchildren for Anna, only for Assing’s admired male host. By the end of 1880, she reported a new tally of Eastern Shore kin who had arrived at Cedar Hill, including another half sister named Kitty, and her son and his wife, who were living in a cottage by the garden. And an eight-year-old boy had just arrived, grandchild of another half sister; Ottilie thought him a “bright boy” who could read and write and might, therefore, bring Douglass “some joy.”51
Assing loved the expansive mansion house and the grounds of nearly fifteen acres. The house had been built in 1855–59 for an architect, John Welsh Van Hook. Douglass purchased the property with nine acres; over the next sixteen years he acquired six more adjoining acres and expanded the structure from fourteen to twenty-one rooms, adding a large new kitchen wing and remodeling the attic into new bedrooms. On her first visit in October 1878, Assing called it “one of the most beautiful places” in America, high “on top of a hill, with magnificent old trees.” The view included the Capitol itself across the bridge over the Anacostia River. The grounds and stables included horses and cows, and Ottilie especially enjoyed sitting on the grass and playing with a calf. But she never wrote to her friend Sylvester Koehler about her time at Cedar Hill without swipes at the domestic situation. The grandchildren included at one point a “completely uncivilized” girl of six years, “so backward” that even “Mrs. Douglass” could not provide “educational influence.” A one-year-old boy, she observed, was a “miserable, weakly child,” about whom she thought it a “veritable crime” to have brought him into the world. Once again, Anna, as well as Rosetta, who was frequently in and out of the house with her own six children, somehow coexisted with Assing, if not with her attitudes. In an 1878 letter to Douglass, Ottilie left a revealing self-description: “I am so entirely unlike the majority of men that I cannot well consider myself at all a standard by which to measure the feelings and sensations of others. A queer and unfortunate mixture of earthly and unearthly matter!”52 Did Douglass sigh with pain or laughter or both? He was losing patience.
By the late 1870s Assing sometimes grumbled about “not receiving my weekly allowance” (a letter from Douglass). He rarely visited her and her friends in Hoboken anymore, since that group had begun to disperse and she found her life there increasingly lonely and, as she wrote in late 1878, “quieter and more boring every year.” Assing frequently referred to her Hoboken circle of friends with the German word Bande, which denotes close emotional, almost kinshiplike, ties. Her Bande had been dissolving and she was adrift.53
The relationship with Douglass was in its last stage as Ottilie quarreled mightily with her sister over their estate, fell into depressions, and once again, indecisively, planned a trip to Europe. In late summer 1878, Douglass expressed “apprehensions” about her potential visit, and apparently about their friendship itself, although we do not know precisely what he said. Some kind of “experiment” had been proposed, possibly about her staying away. “My feelings for you can never change,” she wrote painfully, “but if all this, after all, is nothing to you, or if you anticipate for yourself more pain than pleasure, you know that you can shake me off whenever you please. Border State [Anna] is my smallest trouble. I think I have shown my diplomatic tact by getting along with her nearly twenty years without any serious trouble.” Douglass and Assing were undergoing a slow, if affectionate, breakup. There would be further visits to Washington until Assing sailed for Germany for the final time in August 1881. From a subordinate position, Assing continued to judge and try to micromanage her friend’s ideas, actions, and financial decisions. She forever insisted on her absolutist approach to the “monster” of religion, and on one remarkable evening in late 1880, the two of them paid a visit to the home of a famous agnostic, Robert Ingersoll. The two had enriched, if complicated, each other’s life in countless ways, and Douglass did not give up easily on this long-term relationship rooted in intellectual power. She still bought him cigars, and he rejoiced that he could “yet write without spectacles.” Her letter to him with the profoundly sad offer that he could “shake” her when he pleased, ended with Ottilie’s sudden, mundane spouselike question “Are you sufficiently insured?”54
From as early as late 1878, Assing became aware that Douglass’s huge family was not her only competition as the much-younger forty-year-old Helen Pitts entered Douglass’s circle of friends. Born in Honeoye, New York, of parents with strong abolitionist and feminist backgrounds, well educated at Mount Holyoke College and a former teacher in freedmen’s schools during the Civil War, Pitts first visited her uncle Hiram Pitts in Washington in the summer of 1878. Smart, outgoing, a lover of music, and adroit with her strong views on women’s rights, Helen met the marshal and later got a job in his office. She also became involved with the journal Alpha, a publication of the Moral Education Society.55
Assing detested, as she was also threatened by, Helen Pitts. After meeting her and participating in conversations, Ottilie wrote to Douglass with a venomous pen. Discussing press coverage about the orator’s reputation, she remarked, “I anticipated nothing better on the part of the Pitts set and those connected with them. Mrs. Pitts [Helen was not married] is a crafty plotting woman.” Ottilie seemed convinced that Helen was trying to extract money for some scheme from Douglass and offered strong unsolicited advice. “The falling off in Mrs. Pitts’ visits I should however consider a gain at any rate. There is a distressing lack of genuineness about her, which I imagine even to notice in her face.” Assing’s scorn utterly transparent, she spared Douglass none of her bitter emotions. She hated Alpha, calling it “infamous,” and claiming that “no good and pure-minded woman can advocate those monstrous doctrines . . . [of] obscene stuff hidden under religious cant.” The magazine promoted combinations of religious faith, feminism, and women’s education and equal rights. Only someone, Assing held, who was “incurably and irredeemably stupid” could support such a journal.56 Such early denunciations of Helen came as Anna, ignored by the absolutist Ottilie, was still very much alive. There was only one future Mrs. Douglass, and Ottilie Assing struggled hopelessly against the knowledge that it was not her.
