1 http://time.com/4506800/barack-obama-african-american-history-museum-transcript/.
2 John Stauffer, Zoe Trodd, and Celeste-Marie Bernier, Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed American (New York: Liverlight, 2015).
3 James Baldwin, “Smaller than Life,” review of There Once Was a Slave: The Heroic Story of Frederick Douglass, by Shirley Graham, Nation, July 19, 1947, in James Baldwin, Collected Essays (New York: Library of America, 1998), 578; Michael Lind, The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution (New York: Free Press, 1995), 379. The statue was unveiled June 19, 2013, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/frederick-douglass-statue-unveiled-in-the-capitol/2013/06/19/a64916cc-d906-11e2-a9f2-42ee3912ae0e_story.html?utm_term=.3cbf70ac4859.
4 Abraham J. Heschel, The Prophets (1955; repr., New York: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1962), 10.
5 Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855; repr., New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 325.
1 Inaugural Ceremonies of the Freedmen’s Memorial Monument to Abraham Lincoln. Washington City, April 14, 1876 (St. Louis: Levison & Blythe, 1876), 3 (copy in Huntington Library, San Marino, CA).
2 Ibid., 3–4.
3 Ibid., 4–5; and see Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 114.
4 Inaugural Ceremonies, 5.
5 Ibid., 5–7.
6 Ibid., 8–9.
7 Ibid., 10–15.
8 Douglass, in Anglo-African, September 3 and November 4, 1886; and Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, 90–94, 103–4.
9 “Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln, Delivered at the Unveiling of the Freedmen’s Monument . . . in Lincoln Park, Washington, DC, April 14, 1876,” in Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, 5 vols., ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: International Publishers, 1952), 4:311.
10 Ibid., 4:309–10.
11 Ibid., 4:310–11.
12 Ibid., 4:312.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid., 4:312–13.
15 Ibid., 4:314–15.
16 Ibid., 4:316.
17 See George C. Rable, But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984), 144–85.
18 “Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln,” 4:317–19.
19 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845; repr., Boston: Bedford Books, 1993), 44; Bondage, 30–33; Talbot Land Commission Records, 1818–30, Courthouse, Easton, MD, 307–21, in Dickson J. Preston, Young Frederick Douglass: The Maryland Years (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 27, 31–34. On Dorsch’s birth, see “List of Slaves of Aaron Anthony, 1830,” Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore, MD. The line reads “Frederick Augustus, son of Harriet, Feby 1818.”
20 Bondage, 29–30, 37–39. For my knowledge of the landscapes, the back roads and waterways, of Tuckahoe and all of Talbot County, I wish to thank two local resident experts, Priscilla Morris of Easton, Maryland, and Dale Green, a professor of religion and history at Morgan State University in Baltimore. They also provided me with extraordinary maps, both nineteenth century and current. On June 18–20, 2011, Priscilla took me all over Talbot and Caroline Counties, as well as out on the Wye and Tuckahoe Rivers. My notes are crucial to writing Douglass’s early life.
21 Bondage, 39–40; Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 6.
22 Bondage, 42. In the year or two before finishing My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Douglass had been reading a great deal of “natural history” and ethnography for his major address “The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered,” delivered at Western Reserve College, July 12, 1854. Prichard’s work was not published until 1855, but Douglass must have been reading it as he wrote Bondage. He found the picture of Ramses in the chapter “Of the Egyptian Race,” and in the text the features of the figure are described as “calm and dignified; the forehead is somewhat flat; the eyes are widely separated from each other; the nose is elevated, but with spreading nostrils; the ears are high; the lips large, broad, and turned out, with sharp edges; in which points there is a deviation from the European countenance.” Douglass denounced the racism at the core of most natural-history writing in those years, yet in the autobiography he attributed his skill with words “not to my admitted Anglo-Saxon paternity,” but to his black (and vaguely Egyptian) mother. See James Cowles Prichard, The Natural History of Man: Inquiries into the Modifying Influence of Physical and Moral Agencies on the Different Tribes of the Human Family (London: H. Baillieer, 1855), 143. At the top of the following page are three images, “painted in fresco,” that appear to be particularly attractive Egyptian women; it is possible this affected Douglass’s use of the images together to remember his mother.
23 Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 62–64; Bondage, 44–45.
24 Bondage, 45–46.
25 Narrative, 42; Bondage, 42, 46; Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881; repr., New York: Collier, 1962), 29. See Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 23. Douglass does not tell us the “reason” he doubted Anthony as his father.
26 Bondage, 41, 61–63.
27 Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 22–30. On Anthony’s land holdings, I am grateful for Priscilla Morris’s research in Talbot County property records. Email, Morris to author, June 28, 2011, includes among other valuable information an 1866 land deed from John P. Anthony, Aaron’s grandson.
28 Narrative, 44–46; Bondage, 65–67.
29 Bondage, 66–67.
30 Ibid., 47.
31 Ibid., 46–47.
32 Ibid., 46.
33 Ibid., 47.
34 Ibid., 31–35.
35 Ibid., 34.
36 Ibid., 35.
1 Bondage, 40; Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 38–39.
2 Bondage, 38.
3 Ibid., 39–40.
4 Ibid., 50–52. Today the Wye House is still a private home, lived in by the Richard and Beverly Tilghman family, the direct descendants of the original Lloyds. I was the grateful beneficiary of a wonderful three-hour tour of the house and grounds by the Tilghmans on June 19, 2011. And in May 2017 I stayed overnight in the remodeled old “kitchen house” on the grounds. Tilghman is a lawyer and has taken a deep interest in Frederick Douglass’s connections to his family’s property, financing a major archaeological dig on-site to uncover the nature of slave life at Wye.
5 Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African American Slaves (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 8–10; Douglass, “An Appeal to the British People,” reception speech at Finsbury Chapel, Moorsfield, England, May 2, 1846, in Foner, Life and Writings, 1:155.
6 Bondage, 53, 56.
7 Ibid., 59; Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 54–56; tour with Richard Tilghman, June 19, 2011.
8 Samuel Alexander Harrison, History of Talbot County, Maryland, 1661–1861 (Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1915), 184–210; Dickson J. Preston, Talbot County: A History (Centreville, MD: Tidewater Publishers, 1983), 86, 89–91; Narrative, 53.
9 Bondage, 60, 82–83.
10 Ibid., 78–79, 83–85, 99, 101.
11 Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. Edward Bouverie Pusey (New York: Book-of-the-Month Club, 1996), 240; Jerome Bruner, “Self-Making Narratives,” in Autobiographical Memory and the Construction of a Narrative Self: Developmental and Cultural Perspectives, ed. Robyn Fivush and Catherine A. Haden (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2003), 211.
12 Bondage, 80.
13 Ibid., 55–56.
14 Ibid., 70–73. On Sevier’s identity, see Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 70–71. In the Narrative, Douglass actually spelled the name Severe.
15 Bondage, 72.
16 Ibid., 90–93; Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 72–74. Preston demonstrates with some keen research that Denby did die in 1824, before Frederick Bailey had moved to the Wye plantation.
17 Bondage, 92.
18 Ibid., 84–85.
19 Ibid., 75–76. On the opposites in Douglass’s writing, see Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Binary Oppositions in Chapter One of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself,” in Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the ‘Racial’ Self” (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 80–97.
20 Bondage, 101, 68–69.
21 Ibid., 69.
22 Ibid., 100.
23 Narrative, 59.
24 Bondage, 99–100.
25 Ibid., 98.
26 Narrative, 49–50; Bondage, 74–75.
27 Narrative, 51; Bondage, 75.
28 Bondage, 76.
29 Jeremiah 8:22. On the quest for a degree of “certainty” in slave songs, see Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 30–55.
30 Bondage, 74–75. For the impact of slave songs, especially the spirituals, on children, see Wilma King, Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth Century America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 83–88.
31 Bondage, 203–4; Life and Times, 159–60.
1 Bondage, 100–101; Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 81–82.
2 Narrative, 60–61; Bondage, 101–102. And see Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 82.
3 Narrative, 61; Bondage, 103. Numerous paintings and lithographs depict Baltimore harbor bustling with dozens of ships from the 1820s to the 1850s. The clipper ships were schooner-rigged vessels with two masts and a hull designed for speed. They became the fastest sailing craft afloat and were built in the neighborhood where Douglass lived. See Francis F. Beirne, Baltimore: A Picture History, 1858–1958 (New York: Hastings House, 1957), 16, 26–27; and Howard Irving Chapelle, The Baltimore Clipper: Its Origins and Development (Salem, MA: Maine Research Society, 1930). On the B&O, see Barbara Jeanne Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland during the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 44. For detailed maps of Fell’s Point, Baltimore, see Thomas G. Bradford and S. G. Goodrich, eds., A General Atlas of the World (Boston: C. Strong, 1841), cartweb.geography.ua.edu. On Despeaux and the Haitian slaves, see Madison Smartt Bell, Charm City: A Walk through Baltimore (New York: Crown Publishers, 2007), 95–96.
4 Narrative, 61; Christopher Phillips, Freedom’s Port: The African American Community of Baltimore, 1790–1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 14–15; Beirne, Baltimore, 13, 21; George W. Howard, The Monumental City: Its Past History and Present Resources (Baltimore: J. D. Ehlers, 1873), 68–70.
5 Bondage, 105; Fields, Slavery and Freedom, 40–49, 62; Phillips, Freedom’s Port, 57–82.
6 Bondage, 103.
7 Narrative, 63; Bondage, 106–8.
8 Narrative, 63; Douglass, “The Bible Opposes Oppression, Fraud, and Wrong: An Address Delivered in Belfast, Ireland,” January 6, 1846, in John W. Blassingame et al., eds., Frederick Douglass Papers, ser. 1, vol. 1 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 127–28.
9 Job 3:11, 23; 6:25–26; 7:11.
10 Bondage, 108–9.
11 Ibid., 109.
12 G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, 2nd ed., trans. J. B. Baillie (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 239–40. On Hegel and slavery, see David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1828 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 558–64.
13 Narrative, 65–66; Bondage, 112–14.
14 Bondage, 114.
15 Ibid., 115.
16 Ibid., 115–16; Life and Times, 83.
17 Bondage, 116–17; Caleb Bingham, The Columbian Orator: Containing a Variety of Original and Selected Pieces Together with Rules Calculated to Improve Youth and Others in the Ornamental and Useful Art of Eloquence (1797; repr., Boston: Manning and Loring, 1897). Subsequent references are to this third Boston edition. But also see David W. Blight, ed., The Columbian Orator, 200th anniversary ed. (New York: New York University Press, 1998), especially the introduction, “The Peculiar Dialogue between Caleb Bingham and Frederick Douglass,” xiii–xxix.
18 Born in 1757 in Salisbury, Connecticut, Caleb Bingham went to Dartmouth College during the American Revolution. Moving to Boston, he became an important school reformer and the author and compiler of several bestselling school textbooks until his death in 1817. Books such as A Child’s Companion (a spelling book) and The American Preceptor (designed to teach moral values to children) eventually graced shelves next to the Bible and an almanac in hundreds of thousands of American homes. See William B. Fowle, “Memoir of Caleb Bingham,” American Journal of Education 5 (1858): 325–26; Paul Eugen Camp, “Caleb Bingham,” Dictionary of Literary Biography 42 (1985): 88; and Lillian O. Rosenfield, “Caleb Bingham, 1757–1817” (unpublished paper written at the Library Science School, Simmons College, January 1954), 18, copy in American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA. On Lincoln, see Fred Kaplan, Lincoln: Biography of a Writer (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 50–59; and Kenneth Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence: The Fight over Popular Speech in Nineteenth Century America (New York: William Morrow, 1990), 59. Testimony to the antislavery character of the Columbian Orator appeared at the height of the sectional crisis, in De Bow’s Review 10 (January 1856): 69. De Bow’s included the book on a list of abolitionist books found in Southern schools.
19 Bingham, Columbian Orator (1998), xx–xxi.
20 Bingham, Columbian Orator (1797), 50–54, 72–73, 189–94, 242.
21 Bondage, 116–17.
22 Bingham, Columbian Orator (1797), 104; and see William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass (New York: Norton, 1991), 35–36.
23 Bingham, Columbian Orator (1797), 7–8, 12–19.
24 Bondage, 118–19; Narrative, 68–69.
1 Bondage, 109–10, 112, 115, 134.
2 Ibid., 128; Narrative, 71–72.
3 Bondage, 129; Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 88–91.
4 Bondage, 128–29. For the concept of “social death,” see Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).
5 Bondage, 130; Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 91. On Andrew Anthony’s intemperance, Preston reports (n. 10, p. 224) that Harriet Lucretia Anthony (Andrew’s granddaughter) wrote in the margins of her copy of Douglass’s Bondage, “As my grandfather, Andrew Skinner Anthony, died a young man I know nothing of his cruelty, but I fear Fred is right about his intemperate habits.”
6 Bondage, 119–20.
7 Ibid., 120–21.
8 Ibid., 122. On the rapid and widespread news of the Nat Turner rebellion, and its impact on surrounding states, see Scot French, The Rebellious Slave: Nat Turner in American Memory (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 33–86; Henry Irving Tragle, The Southampton Slave Revolt: A Compilation of Source Material (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1971), 27–170, 370–88. In her slave narrative, Harriet Jacobs prominently discussed the impact of the Turner rebellion in her native section of North Carolina. See Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 63–68.
9 Bingham, Columbian Orator, 27.
10 Bondage, 122–23; Galatians 3:26–28; 2 Corinthians 8:14.
11 Bondage, 122–23.
12 Ibid., 123; Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 97–98; Romans 2:15. For the biblical and philosophical origins and full meanings of the natural-rights tradition, especially as a “moral heritage,” see Paul K. Conkin, Self-Evident Truths: Being a Discourse on the Origins & Development of the First Principles of American Government (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974), 75–101.
13 Bondage, 124, 134–35; Daniel 10:2, 11–12.
14 Bondage, 125–26.
15 Ibid., 133–37.
16 Ibid., 134.
17 Ibid., 138–40; Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 107–8.
18 Narrative, 76–77; Bondage and Freedom, 140–41.
19 Bondage, 142–44; “General Camp Meeting for Talbot County,” Easton Gazette, July 20, 1833. This article announces the camp meeting, beginning August 19 at “Haddaway’s Woods on the Bay Side,” and stresses good access to water and ferries. Douglass’s depictions of the Eastern Shore camp meeting conform to many in histories of the Methodist camp-meeting revival movements of the nineteenth century. See for example, Dickson D. Bruce Jr., And They All Sang Hallelujah: Plain-Folk Camp Meeting Religion, 1800–1845 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1974), 61–95; and John H. Wigger, Taking Heaven by Storm: Methodism and the Rise of Popular Christianity in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 80–103.
20 Bondage, 143–44.
21 Ibid., 146–47.
22 Ibid., 147–49.
23 Ibid., 150; Narrative, 83.
24 Bondage, 152, 158, 169; Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 117–19.
25 Bondage, 152–54.
26 Ibid., 157–60. There are many literary analyses of Douglass’s portrayal of Covey’s violence, and then of his own in self-defense. See in particular Eric J. Sundquist, “Frederick Douglass: Literacy and Paternalism,” and Thad Ziolkowski, “Antitheses: The Dialectic of Violence and Literacy in Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of 1845,” both in Critical Essays on Frederick Douglass, ed. William L. Andrews (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991), 120–32, 148–65.
27 Narrative, 83.
28 Ibid., 83–84.
29 Ibid., 84.
30 Bondage, 164–66.
31 Ibid., 167–72.
32 Ibid., 173–74.
33 Ibid., 175.
34 Ibid., 176–80.
35 John Stauffer, “Frederick Douglass and the Aesthetics of Freedom,” Raritan, 2005, 114–15; Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 127; Bondage, 180–82.
1 Bondage, 184–87.
2 “Temperance Viewed in Connection with Slavery: An Address Delivered in Glasgow, Scotland,” February 18, 1846, in Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 1:166; Bondage, 192–93, 205; Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 129–30; 1 Corinthians 15:46.
3 Bondage, 193, 197.
4 Ibid., 192–93, 195, 201.
5 Ibid., 195–97, 205; Narrative, 94.
6 Bondage, 199–200.
7 Ibid., 201–3, 208–9.
8 Ibid., 207, 211. On the plight of the runaway contemplating escape in the slave narratives more broadly, see William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 1–32, 199–204. The escape became, as Andrews shows, a “rite of passage” of various kinds for slave-narrative authors. Also see Fergus M. Bordewich, The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), parts 3 and 4. And for another classic example of the “preparation for escape” in the narratives, see Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself (1861; repr., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 148–55.
9 Bondage, 203–5.
10 Narrative, 96–97; Bondage, 207.
11 Bondage, 211–14; Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 136–37.
12 Bondage, 215–17. For help in understanding the exact location of Freeland’s farm and the Hambleton home farm, the access to the Bay of Hambleton’s wharf and boats, as well as the route and distances of the forced march to Easton of Douglass and his fellow prisoners, I am indebted to a tour led by Priscilla Morris in June 2011 and to many emails, especially that of June 12, 2012.
13 Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 138–39; McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 54–56; Bondage, 215–19.
14 Bondage, 220–21; Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 139–40.
15 See McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 56–57; and Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 140–41. McFeely may overestimate how much Douglass “had loved” Auld during these years. In the Narrative in 1845, Douglass did not acknowledge Auld’s leniency on his possible punishments, but he did so in Bondage, 223–24.
16 Phillips, Freedom’s Port, 15; Bondage, 224.
17 Bondage, 224–26; Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 142–43.
18 Bondage, 228–29.
19 Ibid., 230–31.
20 Ibid., 226–27, 232. Also see McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 62–63.
21 Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies (New York: Picador, 2008), 10–14, 49–51.
22 Bondage, 232–33; Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 148–49; William E. Lloyd to Douglass, June 13, 1870, FD Papers (LC). Lloyd wrote to Douglass to invite him back to Baltimore to speak and help raise money for a local church. Lloyd also expressed a great eagerness to once again see Anna Douglass. On the free black community of Baltimore, see Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (Baltmore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 33–36, 41–42, 49–50, 166–69, 184–88, 238–40.
23 Caroline County Court records, certificates of freedom, 1827–51, Anna Murray (CM866), Maryland State Archives (MSA SC 5496-051245), http://www.msa.md.gov; Rosetta Douglass Sprague, “Anna Murray Douglass: My Mother as I Recall Her,” 1900, FD Papers (LC), 6–8. On the location and circumstances of Anna’s birth and the manumission of her parents, I am indebted to email correspondence, Priscilla Morris to author, June 28, 2011.
24 Rockman, Scraping By, 247.
25 Bondage, 233, 237–39.
26 Ibid., 240–41.
27 Bondage, 242–43; Life and Times, 198–99; Rockman, Scraping By, 258; Douglass Sprague, “My Mother as I Recall Her,” 10; McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 69–73. For an 1841 map of Baltimore, see http://cartweb.geography.ua.edu (file name Maryland1841b.sid).
28 Life and Times, 198–99. To protect any living people who may have helped him, Douglass did not tell all of the details of his escape until writing this, the third of his autobiographies.
29 Ibid., 199–201.
30 Ibid., 201; Bondage, 247.
31 Bondage, 248.
32 Ibid., 248–51; Narrative, 112. For two speeches in the 1840s where Douglass told of the plight of the fugitive slaves, often reciting long lists of actual runaway advertisements from newspapers, see “Slavery Corrupts American Society and Religion: An Address Delivered in Cork, Ireland, October 17, 1845”; and “The Horrors of Slavery and England’s Duty to Free the Bondsman: An Address Delivered in Taunton, England, September 1, 1846,” in Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 1:51–52, 377–78.
33 Graham Hodges, David Ruggles: A Radical Black Abolitionist and the Underground Railroad in New York City (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 1–2, 103–41. For Frederick’s presence at Ruggles’s court testimony, New York Times, March 11, 1870. On Ruggles and Douglass’s escape, see Eric Foner, Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (New York: Norton, 2015), 1–7, 63–68, 71–77.
34 Bondage, 251; Douglass Sprague, “My Mother as I Recall Her,” 9.
35 Narrative, 114; Richard Blackett, “James W. C. Pennington: A Life of Christian Zeal,” in Beating Against the Barriers: Biographical Essays in Nineteenth Century Afro-American History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), 1–15.
36 Life and Times, 205–6; Bondage, 251.
1 Narrative, 107, 114. In his poignant claim about the Underground Railroad, Douglass wrote, “I have never approved of the very public manner in which some of our western friends have conducted what they call the underground railroad, but which, I think, by their open declarations, has been made most emphatically the upper-ground railroad.” On the fugitive slave experience, see R. J. M. Blackett, Fugitive Slaves, The 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, and the Politics of Slavery (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
2 Ibid., 115; Bondage, 252; Henry H. Crapo, comp., New Bedford Directory, Containing the Names of the Inhabitants, Their Occupations, Places of Business and Dwelling Houses (New Bedford, MA: Benjamin Lindsey, 1839), 91–92, New Bedford Free Public Library. On Douglass’s years and associations in New Bedford, see Griffin Black, “Lion at the Lectern: Frederick Douglass Becomes an Orator 1838–1845,” senior thesis, Yale University, 2018.
3 Bondage, 252–53; Robert Stepto, “Introduction: Frederick Douglass Writes His Story,” Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), xiv–xv; Lady of the Lake, in The Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott (Paris: A. & W. Galignani, 1851), 169–70. On Lady of the Lake as a bestseller in 1810 and for years afterward, and on Scott’s popularity and the forging of not only a Scottish nationalism but also a wave of Scott tourism to the Highlands, see Stuart Kelly, Scott-land: The Man Who Invented a Nation (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2010), 79–81, 95–98.
4 Everett S. Allen, Children of the Light: The Rise and Fall of New Bedford Whaling and the Death of the Arctic Fleet (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), 82–83; Daniel Ricketson, The History of New Bedford, Bristol County, Massachusetts (New Bedford, MA: by the author, 1858), 372–73; Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work (New York: Knopf, 2005), 40. On the free-black and fugitive-slave community of New Bedford, see Kathryn Grover, The Fugitive’s Gibraltar: Escaping Slaves and Abolitionism in New Bedford, Massachusetts (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 1–66. The identities and numbers of fugitive slaves are difficult to determine. Town directories and censuses recorded blacks, but rarely determined whether they were fugitives. Grover cites white abolitionists who put the total of fugitives in New Bedford at 300–700 between 1845 and 1863. Grover found the names or locations of some 170 in her study. Because fugitives tended to dominate the black population, it was predominantly male. The 12,354 residents in New Bedford in 1839 included 709 black males and 342 black females. See Crapo, New Bedford Directory (1841), 28.
5 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851; repr., London: New World Classics, 2011), 49–50.
6 Delbanco, Melville, 38.
7 Robert K. Wallace, Douglass and Melville: Anchored Together in Neighborly Style (New Bedford, MA: Spinner Publications, 2005), 3–21; Robert S. Levine and Samuel Otter, eds., Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville: Essays in Relation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 3; McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 80–81; Bondage, 253–54; Grover, Fugitive’s Gibraltar, 118–43.
8 Bondage, 254–55; Melville, Moby-Dick, 29–42.
9 Life and Times, 210, 212–13; Bondage, 257; Grover, Fugitive’s Gibraltar, 146; William M. Emory, “A New England Romance That Touched New Bedford: The Story of Ephraim and Mary Jane Peabody, Told by Their Sons—Courtship of an Early Minister of the Unitarian Church,” New Bedford Morning Mercury, February 22, 1924, Box 21, Sub-Group 1, series H, folder 1, The First Unitarian Church Records, New Bedford Whaling Museum Archives. I am grateful to Griffin Black for this discovery.
10 Bondage, 256–57; Crapo, New Bedford Directory (1839), 69; Crapo, New Bedford Directory (1841), 65; Wallace, Douglass and Melville, 15.
11 Bondage, 58–60.
12 Frederick Douglass to James W. Wood, December 17, 1894, reprinted in Lenwood G. Davis, “Frederick Douglass as a Preacher, and One of His Last Most Significant Letters,” Journal of Negro History 66, no. 2 (Summer 1981): 141; Life of Rev. Thomas James, by Himself (Rochester, NY: Post Express Printing, 1886), 8–9; Bondage, 260; William L. Andrews, “Frederick Douglass, Preacher,” American Literature 54 (December 1982): 592–96; Crapo, New Bedford Directory (1841), 65. Testimony to Douglass’s formal associations with the AMEZ Church is also found in David Henry Bradley Jr., A History of the AME Zion Church, 1796–1872, 2 vols. (Nashville, TN: Parthenon Press, 1956), 1:111–12. On Douglass as Sunday school superintendent, see Gregory P. Lampe, Frederick Douglass: Freedom’s Voice, 1818–1845 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1998), 38–39.
13 Ellis Gray Loring to Hiram Wilson, August 20, 1840, marked “confidential,” Loring Papers, Letter Press Book, 1837–41, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University. I am grateful to historian Kate Masur for informing me of this letter. And see Black, “Lion at the Lectern,” especially on the influence of the Liberator on the young fugitive, 17–30.
14 Henry H. Crapo, comp., Taxes for 1840, Town of New Bedford, “Frederic Douglas” is listed “paid,” “Feby. 17, 1841”; Taxes for 1841, Town of New Bedford, “Frederick Douglass,” “paid,” “March 18, 1842,” New Bedford Free Public Library, manuscripts and archives. Also see Grover, Fugitive’s Gibraltar, 148–49. List of Voters in the Town of New Bedford (New Bedford, MA: Benjamin Lindsey, 1839), New Bedford Free Public Library.
15 Bondage, 60–61. On Douglass, moral suasion, and oratory, see Lampe, Frederick Douglass, 44–45.
16 Liberator, January 18, February 15, March 8 and 15, 1839.
17 Ibid., March 1 and 8, April 4, May 3, 1839. See Black, “Lion at the Lectern.”
18 Ibid., March 15, April 12, 1839. I am grateful to Griffin Black for pointing me to these citations.
19 Bondage, 261; Life and Times, 213–14; Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 248.
20 Bondage, 262.
21 See Lampe, Frederick Douglass, 40–42; Arthaniel Edgar Harris Sr., “Worship in the A.M.E. Zion Church,” AME Zion Quarterly Review 97 (July 1986): 34–35; William J. Walls, The African American Episcopal Zion Church: Reality of the Black Church (Charlotte, NC: A.M.E. Zion Publishing House, 1974), 148–50.
22 Liberator, March 29, 1839. In Lampe, Frederick Douglass, 46, 55 (nn. 48, 49, 50, 51), the author mistakenly cites several times the Liberator for March 12, 1839. There is no such issue. March 12 is the date of the abolition meeting. In a subsequent note (n. 52) he cites March 29, which is the correct date. For Douglass’s fond remembrance of the Garnet speech, see “Colored People Must Command Respect: An Address Delivered in Rochester, New York, March 13, 1848,” Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 2:113–15.
23 Bondage, 263; Grover, Fugitive’s Gibraltar, 148, 169; New Bedford Register, July 7, 1841. At one anticolonization meeting, Douglass led in condemning specifically the right of Maryland slaveholders to send blacks to Africa, indicating likely the significant numbers of fugitive slaves from that state in New Bedford.
24 Liberator, August 20, 1841; New Bedford Register, August 10, 1841; Parker Pillsbury, Acts of the Antislavery Apostles (Concord, NH: Clague, Wegman, Schlight, 1883), 324–25. Also see Lampe, Frederick Douglass, 58–59.
25 Pillsbury, Acts of the Antislavery Apostles, 325; Foner, Life and Writings, 1:26; National Anti-Slavery Standard, August 26, 1841.
26 Minutes of the Nantucket convention, Liberator, August 20, 1841.
27 Samuel J. May, Some Recollections of the Antislavery Conflict (1869; repr., New York: Arno Press, 1968), 293–94; Pillsbury, Acts of the Antislavery Apostles, 326; National Anti-Slavery Standard, August 26, 1841. Just before adjournment on the night of August 12, Douglass was called upon again to speak; he did so briefly, with yet again a response from Garrison. See Lampe, Frederick Douglass, 62.
28 William Lloyd Garrison, “Preface,” May 1, 1845, Narrative, 31–32. The most extensive account of Douglass’s role at the Nantucket convention is in Lampe, Frederick Douglass, 59–62. For a well-written account, but with some inaccuracies of the Nantucket convention, see McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 86–90. The author has the convention taking place, under threat of a mob attack, on August 16 at a large square building on the edge of town called the Big Shop. McFeely seems to have relied in part on personal correspondence with and a book by Robert F. Mooney and Andre R. Sigourney, The Nantucket Way: Untold Legend and Lore of America’s Most Intriguing Island (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980), and on twentieth-century articles and reminiscences in the Nantucket local newspaper, Inquirer and Mirror.
29 Bondage, 263–64; Narrative, 119; Garrison, “Preface,” Narrative, 32.
30 Bondage, 264–65.
31 Melville, Moby-Dick, 58.
1 Douglass, “My Slave Experience in Maryland,” an address delivered in New York, May 6, 1845, in Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 1:9. The epigraph comes from a typescript, two-page fragment of a speech by Douglass, “Mass Meeting, Faneuil Hall, Feb. 4, 1842,” Walter O. Evans Collection, Savannah, GA, “Assorted Material” box.
2 “From the Herald of Freedom, Frederick Douglass in Concord, N.H.,” in Liberator, February 23, 1844.
3 Ibid.
4 On Douglass’s physical appearance, see John Stauffer, Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (New York: Twelve, 2008), 5–6; and Stauffer, “Frederick Douglass and the Aesthetics of Freedom,” 114–36. On Douglass as symbol, there are many commentators, but a good place to start is John Blassingame’s introduction, Douglass Papers, 1:xxix, lv.
5 Life and Times, 17. For the idea of an era of “Bible politics,” and for two quotations, see James B. Stewart, “God, Garrison, and the Coming of the Civil War,” in William Lloyd Garrison at Two Hundred, ed. James B. Stewart (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 46–47, 94–95; Higginson, quoted in Mayer, All on Fire, 326. For an overstatement of the argument that the abolitionists in the United States were essentially “united,” see Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 5, 256–65, and throughout.
6 For a succinct outline of the major tenets of Garrisonianism, see David W. Blight, “William Lloyd Garrison at Two Hundred: His Radicalism and His Legacy for Our Time,” in Stewart, Garrison at Two Hundred, 6–7. And see James B. Stewart, William Lloyd Garrison and the Challenge of Emancipation (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1992), chs. 3–6; and Aileen S. Kraditor, Means and Ends in American Abolitionism: Garrison and His Critics on Strategy and Tactics, 1834–1850 (New York: Random House, 1967), chs. 3–5.
7 William Lloyd Garrison to Elizabeth Pease, September 16, 1841, in No Union with the Slaveholders, 1841–1849: The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, vol. 3, ed. Walter M. Merrill (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 29–30. Garrison drew here from Job 5:13.
8 Matthew 5:48. And see James B. Stewart, Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery (New York: Hill & Wang, 1996), 88–91.
9 Stewart, Holy Warriors, 92–94. On the origins of the Liberty Party, see Richard H. Sewell, Ballots for Freedom: Antislavery Politics in the United States, 1837–1860 (New York: Norton, 1976), 43–79.
10 On the schism and the developing ideological “war” between “old organization” and “new organization” activists, especially its implications for black abolitionists, see Stephen Kantrowitz, More than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829–1889 (New York: Penguin, 2012), 99–121.
11 Bondage, 264–65; Oliver Johnson, quoted in Lampe, Frederick Douglass, 63.
12 Liberator, August 27, 1841.
13 Life and Times, 223–24.
14 National Anti-Slavery Standard, September 2, 1841; Liberator, September 3, 10, and 24, 1841; and see Lampe, Frederick Douglass, 64. Address delivered in Lynn, Massachusetts, early October, from Pennsylvania Freeman, October 20, 1841, in Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 1:3.
15 Address in Lynn, in Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 1:3–5.
16 John A. Collins to Garrison, October 4, 1841, in Liberator, October 15, 1841; Life and Times, 224.
17 Collins to Garrison, Liberator, October 4, 1841. Blacks forced into the Jim Crow car on the same Eastern Railroad were an all-too-common occurrence in 1841. The staunch Garrisonian and future historian William Cooper Nell experienced the same in August while traveling with Wendell Phillips. See Liberator, September 3, 1841.
18 Collins to Garrison, Liberator, October 4, 1841; Life and Times, 24–25.
19 Collins to Garrison, Liberator, October 4, 1841; Mayer, All on Fire, 306–7; McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 92–93. By the spring of 1842, as the railroads published their schedules, Garrison began printing a weekly column called “travelers’ directory,” with commentaries and rankings on the degree to which the eight companies serving Boston treated the “human rights” of their passengers. See Liberator, April 8, 1842.
20 Douglass Sprague, “My Mother as I Recall Her,” 10–12; Charles R. Douglass, “Some Incidents of the Home Life of Frederick Douglass,” 2–3, an address delivered at Lincoln Memorial Church, Rochester, February 1917, handwritten MS, Evans Collection, “Assorted Material” box. Charles pays special tribute to Anna for her adaptability as mother and wife, and her skill as a shoe binder.
21 Frederick Douglass Jr., a brief autobiographical sketch, Evans Collection, “Douglass Family Papers” file. Frederick Jr. here records that he was born in New Bedford; Charles Douglass, “Some Incidents,” 3; Lampe, Frederick Douglass, app. 3, 295.
22 Life and Times, 222.
23 Alonzo Lewis, The History of Lynn, Including Nahant (Boston: Samuel N. Dickinson, 1844), 2nd ed., 20, 249–52, 255, 258–64; Scott Gac, Singing for Freedom: The Hutchinson Family Singers and the Nineteenth Century Culture Reform (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 131–32.
24 Edmund Quincy to Caroline Weston, October 21, 1841, Weston Family Papers, Boston Public Library (BPL); Proceedings of the Plymouth Co. Antislavery Society at Hingham, reported by the editor of the Hingham Patriot, in Liberator, December 3, 1841.
25 David N. Johnson, Sketches of Lynn: Changes of Fifty Years (Lynn, MA: Thomas P. Nichols, 1880), 230–31. Raleigh Register (NC), repr. in Charleston Courier (SC), August 9, 1845; New Orleans Picayune (LA), September 26, 1843; and see Black, “Lion at the Lectern,” 42–43.
26 Letter by Stanton, in In Memoriam: Frederick Douglass, ed. Helen Pitts Douglass (Philadelphia: John C. Yorston, 1897), reprint, 44. On the setting in Faneuil Hall, January 28, 1842, see Lampe, Frederick Douglass, 107–9. To date, this gathering of four thousand was the largest audience Douglass had ever addressed. See Liberator, February 4, 1842; and Douglass Papers, serv. 1, 1:15.
27 A. W. Weston to D. Weston, April 1, 1842, Weston Family Papers, BPL.
28 “American Prejudice and Southern Religion: An Address Delivered in Hingham, Massachusetts, Nov. 4, 1841,” in Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 1:10–11.
29 “The Southern Style of Preaching to Slaves: An Address Delivered in Boston, Massachusetts, Jan. 28, 1842,” in Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 44.
30 “I Am Here to Spread Light on American Slavery: An Address Delivered in Cork, Ireland, Oct. 14, 1845,” Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 44; in 1:16–17, 44; Garrison to George W. Benson, January 29, 1842, Merrill, Letters of Garrison, 48. On Douglass’s use of contrasts and antithesis, see Lampe, Frederick Douglass, 80.
1 Liberator, April 1, 8, and 22, and May 13, 1842; National Anti-Slavery Standard, May 19, 1842. For the speaking itinerary, see Lampe, Frederick Douglass, 295–97. Smith eventually wrote columns in Douglass’s newspapers as well as the introduction for My Bondage and My Freedom.
2 Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:9n7; John Stauffer, ed., The Works of James McCune Smith: Black Intellectual and Abolitionist (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), xiii–xl; and David W. Blight, “In Search of Learning, Liberty, and Self-Definition: James McCune Smith and the Ordeal of the Antebellum Black Intellectual,” Afro-Americans in New York Life and History 9, no. 2 (July 1995): 7–26.
3 Liberator, July 1, 1842.
4 Ibid., July 8, 1842.
5 Ibid., July 15, 1842.
6 Ibid., Douglass, “I Am Here to Spread Light”; “Slavery Corrupts American Society and Religion,” address delivered in Cork, Ireland, October 17, 1845, in Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 1:42, 42–51; Theodore Dwight Weld, American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1839), 62–63, 73, 144. And see Lampe, Frederick Douglass, 120.
7 Liberator, September 2, 1842.
8 Herald of Freedom, August 26, 1842, in Lampe, Frederick Douglass, 126.
9 Dorothy Sterling, Ahead of Her Time: Abby Kelley and the Politics of Antislavery (New York: Norton, 1991), 1–5, 107–28; Mayer, All on Fire, 265–67.
10 Liberator, August 1842; Lampe, Frederick Douglass, 136–38, 144.
11 Erasmus D. Hudson, “Journal,” August 26–27, 1842, 51–52, Hudson Family Papers, box 2, folder 37, Special Collections and Archives, University of Massachusetts, Amherst Library; Matthew 23:27, 23:16. Also see Isaiah 5:20.
12 On the Erie Canal and its impact, see Carol Sheriff, Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817–1862 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1996); and Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1845 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 216–20. On the emerging new middle class of New York State, see Mary Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
13 Hudson, “Journal,” September 1–2, 8, 11–12, 14, and 16–29, 18–42, 55–57, 59–62, 65–67; National Anti-Slavery Standard, October 13, 1842. See Lampe, Frederick Douglass, 143. Isaiah 53:3, 5, 11.
14 Robert Barclay, Agricultural Tour in the United States and Upper Canada (London, 1842), quoted in Oliver W. Holmes and Peter T. Rohrbach, Stagecoach East: Stagecoach Days in the East from the Colonial Period to the Civil War (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Press, 1983), 47; Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation (1842; repr., New York: Penguin, 2000), 207–9, 213–14.
15 Harriet Martineau, Society in America, vol. 2 (New York: Saunders & Otley, 1837), 13–15, 19, 23–24, 106–36, 214; Dickens, American Notes, 72.
16 Liberator, October 28 and November 25, 1842; Latimer Journal and North Star, November 18 and 23, 1842. On Latimer case, see Kantrowitz, More than Freedom, 70–74.
17 Liberator, November 4, 1842; National Anti-Slavery Standard, November 10, 1842; Douglass to Garrison, Lynn, November 8, 1842, in Liberator, November 18, 1842; and see Lampe, Frederick Douglass, 146.
18 Douglass to Garrison, Lynn, November 8, 1842, in Liberator, November 18, 1842; and see Kantrowitz, More than Freedom, 73–74. On Garrisonian ideology and theology, see John R. McKivigan, The War against Proslavery Religion: Abolitionism and the Northern Churches, 1830–1865 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), chs. 1–8; Lewis Perry, Racial Abolitionism: Anarchy and the Government of God in Antislavery Thought (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974), chs. 1–7; and W. Caleb McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013), esp. 1–87.
19 Antislavery meeting, Princeton, MA, February 1–2, 1843, Liberator, March 10, 1843.
20 A. W. Weston to Maria Weston Chapman, extract of letter, Boston, March 6, 1843, Weston Family Papers, BPL; antislavery meeting, Lowell, MA, April 25, 1843, Liberator, May 12, 1843.
21 “The Anti-Slavery Movement, the Slave’s Only Earthly Hope,” speech, New York, May 9, 1843, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 1:21–23; Garrison’s letter about the New York convention, May 9, 1843, in Merrill, Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, 3:64; National Anti-Slavery Standard (hereafter NASS), June 8, 1843; Liberator, May 26, 1843. See Lampe, Frederick Douglass, 156–62.
22 Liberator, June 16, 1843; for schedules of conventions, see Liberator, July 14 and October 13, 1843; Life and Times, 226; Douglass to Abby Kelley, June 19, 1843, Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:8–9.
23 Life and Times, 227.
24 Ibid., 228; Douglass to Maria Weston Chapman, September 10, 1843, Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:12.
25 John Collins to Chapman, August 23, 1843; Mrs. E. M. Collins to Chapman, August 15, 1843, Weston Family Papers, BPL; Douglass to Chapman, September 10, 1843, Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:10–13. See Lampe, Frederick Douglass, 176–79.
26 Liberator, August 25, 1843; Life and Times, 229.
27 Life and Times, 229; Lampe, Frederick Douglass, 180.
28 Holley’s daughter quoted in Frederick May Holland, Frederick Douglass: The Colored Orator (New York: Haskell House, 1891), 93–94; Ephesians 6:5; Luke 12:47.
29 Howard Holman Bell, ed., Minutes of the Proceedings of the National Negro Conventions, 1830–1864 (New York: Arno Press, 1969), Buffalo Convention, 4–5; Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 184–85, 226–27.
30 Martin B. Pasternak, Rise Now and Fly to Arms: The Life of Henry Highland Garnet (New York: Garland, 1995), 3–15; Reverend Henry Highland Garnet, A Memorial Discourse, Delivered in the Hall of the House of Representatives, Washington, DC, Feb. 12, 1865, introduction by James McCune Smith (Philadelphia: Joseph M. Wilson, 1865), 17–36. Smith’s biographical sketch of Garnet’s life is the best place to begin. Also see Joel Schor, Henry Highland Garnet: A Voice of Black Radicalism in the Nineteenth Century (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977).
31 Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 226–27; Stanley Harrold, The Rise of Aggressive Abolitionism: Addresses to the Slaves (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2004), “An Address to the Slaves of the United States,” 180–88.
32 Bell, Minutes, 12–13, 15, 18–19, 23–24; Maria Weston Chapman, in Liberator, September 22, 1843. And see Sinha, Slave’s Cause, 418–19.
33 Liberator, September 22 and October 13, 1843; Life and Times, 230; National Anti-Slavery Standard, October 19, 1843.
34 William A. White to “Dear friend,” Liberator, October 13, 1843; NASS, October 19, 1843; Life and Times, 231. White’s detailed account of the Pendleton mob scene is crucial for its descriptive character. But also see McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 108–12, who points to the deep class prejudices in White’s account, as well as in the understandings of the Boston Garrisonians.
35 Douglass to William A. White, Scotland, July 30, 1846, FD Papers (LC), reel 1; Joseph Borome, ed., “Two Letters of Frederick Douglass,” Journal of Negro History 33 (October 1948): 470–71; and Lampe, Frederick Douglass, 186–89.
36 Liberator, October 20, 1843; Abraham Brooke to Maria Weston Chapman, October 5 and October 10, 1843, Weston Family Papers, BPL. See McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 112–13; and Lampe, Frederick Douglass, 190–91.
37 Cincinnati Philanthropist and New Lisbon Advocate, in Liberator, November 17 and December 8, 1843; Bradburn to John Collins, November 22, 1843, quoted in Benjamin Quarles, Frederick Douglass (1948, repr., New York: Atheneum, 1968), 33.
38 Milo A. Townsend to Garrison, New Brighton, Beaver County, PA, November 10, 1843, in Liberator, December 8, 1843; Pittsburgh Spirit of Liberty, in Liberator, December 1, 1843.
39 Philadelphia Weekly Cultivator, in Liberator, December 22, 1843; itineraries, in Lampe, Frederick Douglass, 301–302.
40 Douglass to Wendell Phillips, February 10, 1844, quoted in Lampe, Frederick Douglass, 208–09; Douglass to Garrison, in Liberator, March 15, 1944. Money was very much an issue now for the AASS and its agents. See Abby Kelley to E. D. Hudson, Durham, NH, July 23, 1844, Hudson Family Papers, box 2, folder 53. “Let us remember we have not an individual person to give us a cent or to ask others to give us a cent,” Kelley wrote. The AASS was “in great need of funds.”
41 Douglass to Garrison, in Liberator, November 1, 1844. See itineraries, Lampe, Frederick Douglass, 302–5.
42 Narrative, 62. The book was published in late May 1845 at the Antislavery Office, 25 Cornhill Street, Boston, Massachusetts.
1 Frederick Douglass, “The Folly of Our Opponents,” Liberty Bell (Boston: Antislavery Office, 1845), 166–72, in Foner, Life and Writings, 1:113.
2 Liberator, May 9, 1845. Garrison’s endorsement of the book is a genuine preface, while Phillips’s imprimatur is a letter written to Douglass, April 22, 1845. See Narrative, 31–40.
3 Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates Jr., eds., The Slave’s Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), xvi; Andrews, To Tell a Free Story, 97–98; Douglass Papers, 1:59n11; and Charles H. Nichols, “Who Read the Slave Narratives?,” Phylon 20 (Summer 1959): 149–62; Liberator, August 29, 1845.
4 Liberator, August 22, 1845. On Buffum, see Douglass Papers, 1:50–51n5. Buffum may have been instrumental in financially helping Anna and the family. Douglass always recollected Buffum warmly as “my friend.” See Life and Times, 232, 246, 467.
5 www.norwayheritage.com/p_ship.asp; Dale Cockrell, ed., Excelsior: Journals of the Hutchinson Family Singers, 1842–1846 (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon, 1989), 315–16, 319; Scott Gac, Singing for Freedom: The Hutchinson Family Singers and the Nineteenth Century Culture of Antebellum Reform (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 208–10; Simon Schama, “Sail Away,” New Yorker, May 31, 2004.
6 Life and Times, 233.
7 Douglass to Garrison, Dublin, September 1, 1845, in Liberator, September 26, 1845; Delbanco, Melville, 145. By “Governor Hammond’s Letters,” Douglass refers to James Henry Hammond’s Two Letters on Slavery in the United States, Addressed to Thomas Clarkson, Esq., published in 1845. Hammond had been elected governor of South Carolina in 1842 and owned a ten-thousand-acre plantation and 147 slaves. His proslavery writings were among the most influential of the antebellum era (the “Letters” were actually extended essays). See Drew Gilpin Faust, The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), 168–205.
8 Douglass to Garrison, September 1, 1845, in Liberator, September 26, 1845; Bondage, 270–71.
9 Bondage, 280.
10 Cockrell, Excelsior, 320; Douglass to Garrison, Dublin, September 1 and 16, 1845, in Liberator, September 26 and October 10, 1845; Tom Chaffin, Giant’s Causeway: Frederick Douglass’s Irish Odyssey and the Making of an American Visionary (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014), 35–47.
11 Richard Webb to Maria Weston Chapman, May 16, 1846, Antislavery Collection, BPL.
12 Douglass to Garrison, in Liberator, October 24, 1845.
13 McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 119–20; Jane Jennings to Maria Weston Chapman, Cork, November 26, 1845, Weston Family Papers, BPL.
14 Isabel Jennings to Maria Weston Chapman, Cork, October 15, 1845, and Isabel Jennings to Chapman, 1845 (n.d.), Weston Family Papers, BPL.
15 Cork Examiner, October 15, 1845, report of “My Experience and My Mission to Great Britain,” delivered in Cork, Ireland, October 14, 1845, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 1:37. For Douglass’s response to such characterizations, see Lee Jenkins, “Beyond the Pale: Frederick Douglass in Cork,” Irish Review 24 (1999): 90–91. On Douglass in Ireland, there is a growing literature. See Tom Chaffin, “Frederick Douglass’s Irish Liberty,” New York Times, Opinionator column, February 25, 2011; and Chaffin, Giant’s Causeway, 70–79.
16 Cork Southern Reporter, October 16, 1845, and Cork Examiner, October 15, 1845, quoted in Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 1:39; Belfast quotation in Jenkins, “Beyond the Pale,” 91.
17 James Buffum to Caroline Weston, Perth, Scotland, June 25, 1846; James Buffum to M. W. Chapman, Perth, Scotland, June 26, 1846; and Richard D. Webb to M. W. Chapman, Dublin, May 16, 1846; Weston Family Papers, BPL.
18 Douglass to Richard D. Webb, Belfast, December 6, 1845; Douglass to Webb, Limerick, Ireland, November 10, 1845; Douglass to Webb, Limerick, December 5 and 6, 1845; and Richard D. Webb to M. W. Chapman, Dublin, May 16, 1846; Weston Family Papers, BPL.
19 Douglass to Maria Weston Chapman, Kilmarnock, Scotland, March 29, 1846; and Douglass to Webb, Belfast, December 6, 1845; Weston Family Papers, BPL.
20 Douglass to Webb, Belfast, March 29, 1846, Weston Family Papers, BPL.
21 “Intemperance and Slavery,” address delivered in Cork, Ireland, October 20, 1845; “American Prejudice against Color,” address at Imperial Hotel, Cork, Ireland, October 23, 1845; “The Annexation of Texas,” address at the Independent Chapel, Cork, Ireland, November 3, 1845; and “Slavery and America’s Bastard Republicanism,” address delivered at Belford Row Independent Chapel, Limerick, Ireland, November 10, 1845; in Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 1:55–87. And see Chaffin, Giant’s Causeway, 84–93.
22 “The Cambria Riot, My Slave Experience, and My Irish Mission,” speech delivered in Belfast, December 5, 1845; and “The Slanderous Charge of Negro Inferiority,” Belfast, December 11, 1845; Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 1:93–97, 98–100; “Slavery and the Slave Power,” Rochester, December 1, 1850, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 2:258; Jenkins, “Beyond the Pale,” 83–84; Chaffin, Giant’s Causeway, 94–101.
23 “Baptists, Congregationalists, the Free Church and Slavery,” Belfast, December 23, 1845, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 1:105–6; Mary Ireland to Maria Weston Chapman, January 24, 1846, Weston Family Papers, BPL.
24 Mary Ireland to Maria Weston Chapman, January 24, 1846, Belfast, Weston Family Papers, BPL. Many were “offended,” according to Mary Ireland, because of Douglass’s “uncompromising tone.” “Baptists, Congregationalists, the Free Church and Slavery,” 103, 105, 108–9, 113–18; Matthew 23:15; Luke 10:30–35; Daniel 6:12–23.
25 Christine Kinealy, The Great Irish Famine: Impact, Ideology, and Rebellion (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 17–19; Lawrence M. Geary, “What People Died of during the Famine,” in Famine 150: Commemorative Lecture Series, ed. Cormac O’Grada (Dublin: Teagasc, 1997), 95. An excellent introduction to the Irish famine as history and memory is James S. Donnelly Jr., The Great Irish Potato Famine (Gloucestershire, UK: Sutton, 2001), 1–40. Donnelly is especially interesting on historiography and on whether Ireland was sliding “toward the abyss” of agricultural catastrophe well before 1845. On emigration and population decline, see John Keating, Irish Famine Facts (Dublin: Teagasc, 1996), 67–76.
26 Colm Tóibín and Diarmaid Ferriter, The Irish Famine: A Documentary (London: London Review of Books, 2002), 40; Douglass to William Lloyd Garrison, Montrose, Scotland, February 26, 1846, in Liberator, March 27, 1846.
27 Douglass to Garrison, February 26, 1846; Kinealy, Great Irish Famine, 29.
28 Douglass to Garrison, February 26, 1846. On Douglass’s response to the famine, both during his visit to Ireland and in years afterward, see Patricia Ferreira, “ ‘All but a Black Skin and Wooly Hair’: Frederick Douglass’s Witness of the Irish Famine,” American Studies International 37 (June 1999): 69–83; and Douglass, “Thoughts and Recollections of a Tour of Ireland,” AME Church Review 3 (1886): 138–44.
29 Ibid.; Tóibín and Ferriter, Irish Famine, 39–40. The worst of the evictions and effects of the Poor Laws did not take place until 1847, after Douglass had left Ireland. See Kinealy, Great Irish Famine, 29–46, 141–42.
30 Bondage, 74. “The Green Fields of Americay” is a traditional Irish folk song about emigration to America. See http://www.clarelibrary.ie/eolas/coclare/songs/cmc/the_green_fields_of_america_jlyons.htm.
31 Douglass to Garrison, Victoria Hotel, Belfast, January 1, 1846, in Foner, Life and Writings, 1:125–27.
32 Ibid., 126–29.
33 Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (Dublin: Webb and Chapman, 1846), the second Dublin edition, copy in Beinecke Library, Yale University, iii–iv, cxxxii. On the Irish editions, see Fionnghuala Sweeney, Frederick Douglass and the Atlantic World (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), 13–36.
1 Isaiah 1:5, 15, recited by Douglass in “The Free Church of Scotland and American Slavery,” delivered in Dundee, Scotland, January 30, 1846, in Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 1:146–47.
2 C. Duncan Rice, The Scots Abolitionists, 1833–1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), 116–30; George Shepperson, “The Free Church and American Slavery,” Scottish Historical Review 30 (October 1951): 126–43; George Shepperson, “Frederick Douglass and Scotland,” Journal of Negro History 38 (July 1953): 307–21; Alisdair Pettinger, “Send Back the Money: Douglass and the Free Church of Scotland,” in Liberating Sojourn: Frederick Douglass and Transatlantic Reform, ed. Alan J. Rice and Martin Crawford (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999), 31–49; Paul Giles, “Douglass’s Black Atlantic: Britain, Europe, and Egypt,” in The Cambridge Companion to Frederick Douglass, ed. Maurice S. Lee (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 132–36.
3 Douglass, “An Account of American Slavery,” delivered at City Hall, Glasgow, Scotland, January 15, 1846, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 1:133, 138–42.
4 Isaiah 1:4, 10, 15. On the jeremiad, see Perry Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 27–39; Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), 148–210; David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 101–5, 117–20; and David Howard-Pitney, The African American Jeremiad: Appeals for Justice in America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005). On the Hebrew prophets, see Abraham Heschel, The Prophets (New York: Harper, 1962). And on Douglass’s use of biblical narrative to engage the “Free Church” debate in Scotland, see D. H. Dilheck, Frederick Douglass: America’s Prophet (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 63–74.
5 Bondage, 281.
6 Douglass, “Charges and Defense of the Free Church,” delivered in Dundee, Scotland, March 10, 1846, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 1:178–79.
7 Ibid., 180–82; Philemon 1:10–11; Colossians 4:9. Paul, while in a Roman prison, sends the slave (servant), Onesimus, to Philemon likely for manumission and for the furthering of faith.
8 Anonymous to Thomas Chalmers, April 2, 1846, Thomas Chalmers Papers, New College Library, Edinburgh, quoted in Pettinger, “Send Back the Money,” in Rice and Crawford, Liberating Sojourn, 42.
9 Douglass to Richard D. Webb, Dundee, Scotland, February 10, 1846; Douglass to Garrison, Glasgow, April 16, 1846; Douglass to Amy Post, Edinburgh, April 28, 1846; Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:92–93, 109, 122; Bondage, 283; Rice, Scots Abolitionists, 144–45.
10 Vernon Loggins, “Writings of the Leading Negro Antislavery Agents, 1840–1865” (1931), in Andrews, Critical Essays, 45. On the sheer scale of Douglass’s popularity in Scotland and England, see R. J. M. Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall: Black Americans and the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement, 1830–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), 89–90, 106–12.
11 Bondage, 280; Douglass to Garrison, Perth, Scotland, January 27, 1846, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 1:81–83, 86 n1. Thompson’s full name was the improbable Absalom Christopher Columbus Americus Vespucious Thompson. He was born in 1822, and his father owned a farm near St. Michaels, Maryland, and therefore in proximity to Auld’s home and store in the town. Douglass had baited Thompson sufficiently enough by his response, as had the Albany Patriot editor, that Thompson further sought to discredit Douglass’s veracity. The Albany letter is reprinted in Liberator, February 27, 1846.
12 Douglass to Garrison, January 27, 1846, Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:84–85.
13 Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (Dublin: Webb and Chapman, G. T. Brunswick Street, 1846), preface, February 6, 1846, vi, cxxiii–cxxviii. On the Irish edition and the Thompson exchange, see Patricia J. Ferreira, “Frederick Douglass in Ireland: The Dublin Edition of his Narrative,” New Hibernian Review 5, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 60–67.
14 See Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall, 85; and Louisa Cheves Stoney, ed., Thomas Smyth: Autobiographical Notes, Letters, and Reflections (Charleston, SC, 1914), 362–75. Blackett discovered this story, and his judgment that the episode was “transparent and tasteless” seems accurate, even if gracefully understated. It was one among other uses of racial-sexual stereotypes to discredit Douglass during his early career.
15 Douglass to Horace Greeley, Glasgow, April 15, 1846, in New York Tribune, May 20, 1846, Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:103–6, and nn. 6–7, 107; Matthew 12:20; Othello, act 1, sc. 3, lines 80–81. The attacks on Douglass appeared in the New York Herald, September 27, October 6, and December 1, 1845, and the New York Express attack was reprinted in National Anti-Slavery Standard, February 12, 1846.
16 Douglass to Garrison, Glasgow, Scotland, April 16, 1846; Douglass to William A. White, Edinburgh, July 30, 1846; Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:108, 147–50.
17 Leigh Fought, “Frederick Douglass’s Lost ‘Sister’: Harriet Bailey/Ruth Cox Adams,” manuscript essay provided by the author. Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:125–26n1. The editors of the Douglass Papers have mistakenly dated Cox’s escape as 1842 and her meeting with Douglass as 1843. Fought’s research has clarified these details. Also see McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 98–99, 103, 136–38. McFeely first exposed this story and, understandably, portrayed Harriet Bailey and Ruth Cox as two separate women who claimed to be Douglass’s sisters.
18 Douglass to Ruth Cox, May 16, 1846, Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:124.
19 Ibid., 125. Editors of Douglass Papers suggest the song “Camels a Coming” was a Scottish jig, “The Campbells Are Coming,” adapted by Robert Burns. But there is little reason for Douglass to assume Harriet would know that tune. It just as easily could have been some variation on the biblical story Genesis 24:60–63. “And they blessed Rebekah, and said unto her, Thou art our sister, be thou the mother of thousands of millions, and let thy seed possess the gate of those which hate them. / And Rebekah arose, and her damsels, and they rode upon the camels, and followed the man: and the servant took Rebekah, and went his way. / And Isaac came from the way of the well La-hai-roi; for he dwelt in the south country. / And Isaac went out to meditate in the field at the eventide: and he lifted up his eyes, and saw, and, behold, the camels were coming.” Also see John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 159–60. Stauffer says the song was an old favorite from Douglass’s slave days.
20 Douglass to Ruth Cox, London, August 18, 1846, Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:156–57.
21 Fought, “Frederick Douglass’s Lost ‘Sister,’ ” 3–11.
22 Douglass to Francis Jackson, Dundee, Scotland, January 29, 1846, Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:89–90. Jackson was part of Garrison’s close-knit “Boston clique” of funders and supporters. See Stewart, William Lloyd Garrison, 128–30.
23 Douglass to Abigail Mott, Ayr, Scotland, April 23, 1846, Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:111–13; Robert Crawford, The Bard: Robert Burns, a Biography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 4–6. On Douglass and Burns, and the American’s fondness for quoting from the poem “A man’s a man for a’ that,” see Pettinger, “Send Back the Money,” in Rice and Crawford, Liberating Sojourn, 44–46, 49.
24 William Lloyd Garrison to Helen E. Garrison, “At Sea,” July 26 and 31, 1846, in Merrill, Letters of Garrison, 3:354–57; Bondage, 275; Life and Times, 241.
25 Douglass to R. D. Webb, Glasgow, Scotland, April 16, 20, and 26, 1846, Garrison MSS., BPL; R. D. Webb to M. W. Chapman, September 1 and October 31, 1846, Weston Family Papers, BPL; Douglass to Maria Weston Chapman, London, August 18, 1846, Garrison MSS., BPL. On these disputes with Webb and Chapman, see Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall, 109–12; and McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 136.
26 Douglass to Isabel Jennings, Edinburgh, July 30, 1846, Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:152–53; Garrison to Helen Garrison, London, September 17, 1846, in Merrill, Letters of Garrison, 3:415.
27 Douglass to Ruth Cox, Belfast, July 17, 1846, Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:144; McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 136–38.
28 Douglass to Garrison, London, May 23, 1846, Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:131–32. On the matter of the Aulds’ alleged desire to find and re-enslave Douglass, see Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 173–74. Preston aptly points out that Auld needed the money more than he needed Douglass.
29 Alfred M. Duster, ed., Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 161–63.
30 Douglass to Anna Richardson, London, August 19, 1846, in private hands, sold at auction by Seth Kaller, Inc., copy provided the author by Leigh Fought in email, October 7, 2013; Douglass to James Wilson, Belfast, July 23, 1846, Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:145–46; Garrison to Helen E. Garrison, London, September 17, 1846, in Merrill, Letters of Garrison, 3:415.
31 Douglass to Isabel Jennings, Glasgow, September 22, 1846, Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:166.
32 Anna Richardson to Hugh Auld, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, August 17, 1846; and Hugh Auld to Mrs. Anna Richardson, Baltimore, October 6, 1846, in Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 174. Douglass reprinted the sale and manumission documents in Life and Times, 256–57. Many in the press called the deal a “ransom,” but so did Douglass himself. See Douglass to John Hardinge Veitch, Coventry, January 22, 1847; and for further details on the purchase, Henry C. Wright to Douglass, Doncaster, December 12, 1846, Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:182–83, n. 1, 198. On the purchase of Douglass’s freedom, and the role of the lawyers, see McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 143–45. One of the major contributors to the fund to purchase Douglass’s freedom was John Bright, the distinguished Quaker and radical British statesman, who gave £50.
33 Douglass to Henry C. Wright, Manchester, December 22, 1846, Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:196–99. Henry C. Wright to Douglass, December 12, 1846; Douglass to Veitch, January 22, 1847; Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:179–82, 183–89; Ohio Antislavery Bugle, n.d., and Garrison’s response of approval of the “ransom,” in Liberator, February 12, 1847. To his credit, Garrison defended the entire purchase effort.
34 McDaniel, Problem of Democracy, 143–44; Richard Bradbury, “Frederick Douglass and the Chartists,” in Rice and Crawford, Liberating Sojourn, 169–72; Garrison to Helen Garrison, London, August 13, 1846, in Merrill, Letters of Garrison, 368–69. On Chartism as a movement, also see Malcolm Chase, Chartism: A New History (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2007).
35 Garrison to Edmund Quincy, London, August 14, 1846; Garrison to Richard D. Webb, Birmingham, September 4, 1846; in Merrill, Letters of Garrison, 3:372–73, 396; Douglass to Garrison, London, May 23, 1846, Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:129. On Douglass and his ambivalent relationship to Chartism, see McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 138–42.
36 William Lovett, The Life and Struggles of William Lovett (London: Bell, 1920), 328–29, quoted in Bradbury, “Douglass and the Chartists,” 178.
37 Douglass, “Slavery as It Now Exists in the United States,” address in Bristol, England, August 25, 1846; and Douglass, “American Slavery and Britain’s Rebuke of Manstealers,” address in Bridgewater, England, August 31, 1846; Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 1:343–44, 365–66. On the wage-slavery/black-slavery tension, and Douglass’s own struggle over it, see McDaniel, Problem of Democracy, 144–48.
38 Douglass, “American Slavery Is America’s Disgrace,” address in Sheffield, England, March 25, 1847, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 2:11.
39 Hannah Rose Murray compiled Douglass’s speeches, http://site/frederickdouglassinbritain/frederick-douglass-s-mission-to-britain/map-of-speaking-locations. On the crowd estimations, see Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 1:269, 459, 466; and “electric speed,” in Douglass, “Farewell Address to the British People, London,” March 30, 1847, Foner, Life and Writings, 1:230.
40 Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 2:20; Douglass, “Farewell Address,” 1:208–9, 213.
41 Douglass, “Farewell Address,” 1:209, 212–13, 216.
42 Ibid., 1:214, 224–25, 232; London Morning Chronicle, March 31, 1847, in Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 2:20.
43 Sheffield Mercury, September 11, 1846, in Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 1:398. The price of passage and discrimination on the Cambria in Life and Times, 258; and especially Douglass to John Thadeus Delane, editor of the London Times, Liverpool, April 3, 1847, Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:201–2; and enormous press coverage reprinted in Liberator, May 14, 1847. On Douglass’s return to America also see Stauffer, Giants, 93–95; and McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 145.
44 Douglass to Anna Richardson, Lynn, April 29, 1847, Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:208–9. The verse is from the Burns poem “Tam O’Shanter, a Tale.”
1 Douglass to William and Robert Smeal, Lynn, April 29, 1847, Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:205–6. His son Lewis was five and a half years old and Charles was two and a half.
2 Ibid., 206–7; letter reprinted in NASS, July 8, 1847; Wendell Phillips to Sidney H. Gay, Boston, April 23, 1847, Sidney Howard Gay Papers, Columbia University. Douglass detailed his Cambria experience in a letter, NASS, May 6, 1847.
3 Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 2:57–58, headnote; NASS, May 13, 1847; Garrison to Liberator, May 11, 1847, in Merrill, Letters of Garrison, 3:478–79. Rosetta was seven years old in the spring of 1847.
4 Douglass, “The Right to Criticize American Institutions,” in Foner, Life and Writings, 1:235–36. An original typescript of this special speech is in the Evans Collection, Savannah, GA, “Assorted Material” box.
5 Ibid., 237. Jack R. Lundbom, The Hebrew Prophets: An Introduction (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010), 88–100; John Bright, ed. and trans., Jeremiah (New York: Doubleday, 1965), 9–18, 60–74; Jeremiah 4:5–31, 5:1–31, 6:1–30, 7:1–34, 8:1–3, 9:1–21.
6 “Right to Criticize American Institutions,” 237–43. From his British sojourn Douglass raised for special chastisement the Reverends Samuel H. Cox, who had publicly attacked Douglass’s insistence on bringing the subject of slavery into the World’s Temperance Convention in London in 1846, and Thomas Smyth, the South Carolina Presbyterian who demanded sympathy for slaveholders’ dilemmas at the London Evangelical Alliance; Jeremiah 6:14.
7 Letter in Liberator, June 4, 1847; New York Sun, May 13, 1847; Whittier, National Era, May 20, 1847, quoted in Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 2:58, and ser. 3, 1:219.
8 Douglass to Thomas Van Rensselaer, Lynn, May 18, 1847, Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:210–12, reprinted in Liberator, June 4, 1847.
9 Douglass to Garrison, Lynn, June 7, 1847, Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:214–18; Elias Smith to Sydney Howard Gay, New York, May 29, 1847, Gay Papers, Columbia University. Smith wrote to Gay, worried about this “serious charge” against Douglass, suggesting that Miss Mott had traveled with him to help him work on his speech, and the claim that they were “caught in bed together” was “false in toto.”
10 Douglass to Garrison, Lynn, June 7, 1847, Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:215–16.
11 Ibid., 214; Samuel May Jr. to John B. Estlin, July 1, 1847, quoted in Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:219n1; Douglass to Boston Daily Whig, Lynn, June 27, 1847, in Foner, Life and Writings, 1:252–53; Liberator, July 9 and 16, 1847.
12 Douglass to Garrison, Lynn, July 18, 1847, Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:223.
13 Douglass, “Pioneers in a Holy Cause,” address in Canandaigua, NY, August 2, 1847, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 2:71–83.
14 See Garrison to Henry C. Wright, Boston, July 16, 1847, in Merrill, Letters of Garrison, 3:202.
15 On the prospects for the Ohio tour, see Mayer, All on Fire, 363–66.
16 On comeouterism, see Kraditor, Means and Ends in American Abolitionism, 105, 115; Mayer, All on Fire, 300–304. On disunion, see Stewart, William Lloyd Garrison, 124–38, Douglass, “The Material and Moral Requirements of Antislavery Work,” Norristown, PA, August 5, 1847, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 2:84, 86. Though there were many speakers at this gathering, Garrison admitted that Douglass was “the lion of the occasion.”
17 Douglass, “Brethren, Rouse the Church,” Philadelphia, August 6, 1847, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 2:91–93.
18 Douglass to Sydney H. Gay, Harrisburg, PA, August 8, 1847, Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:223–26; Garrison to Helen Garrison, Harrisburg, PA, August 9, 1847, Letters of WLG, 3:506–7. Douglass wrote several letters to Gay during the tour that were meant for publication in the NASS, and Garrison wrote many to his wife, some of which were published in the Liberator.
19 Douglass to Readers of the Ram’s Horn, New Brighton, PA, August 13–14, 1847, Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:228–31.
20 Douglass to Gay, Austinburg, OH, August 31, 1847; and Douglass to Gay, Cleveland, September 17, 1847; Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:239–42, 244–45; Garrison to Liberator, Richfield, OH, August 25, 1847, Letters of WLG, 3:518–19. Garrison described the “wonderful spectacle” of these gatherings and reported that “one colored man rode three hundred miles on horseback to be at the meeting.”
21 Douglass to Gay, Austinburg, OH, August 31, 1847; and Douglass to Gay, Cleveland, September 17, 1847; Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:239–41, 244–48; Samuel May to Gay, October 5, 1847, quoted in Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 2:94n2. On the Oberlin Tent, see Mayer, All on Fire, 367–69. It was created by the Tappan brothers in 1836.
22 Garrison to Helen Garrison, Youngstown, OH, August 16, 1847; Garrison to Helen Garrison, New Lyme, OH, August 20, 1847; Letters of WLG, 3:512, 516; Douglass to Gay, Winfield, OH, September 26, 1847, Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:250–53.
23 Douglass to Gay, West Winfield, NY, September 26, 1847, Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:250–53; Garrison to Helen Garrison, Cleveland, October 19 and 20, 1847, Letters of WLG, 3:531–33. Douglass included in his letter to Gay a detailed account of all he knew about Garrison’s dire illness. On the beginnings of the split between the two men, see Mayer, All on Fire, 371–75.
24 Howard Holman Bell, ed., “1847—Troy: Proceedings of the National Convention of Colored People, and Their Friends,” in Minutes of the Proceedings, 1–32. See Douglass to Gay, Albany, October 4, 1847, Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:256–59.
25 See McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 147–48. Letters to Chapman, see for example Mary Estlin to Chapman, October 18, 1847; Mary Brady to Chapman, n.d., but has to be summer at least of 1847; Lucy Browne to Chapman, April 14, 1847; and Isabel Jennings to Chapman, August 2, 1847, Weston Family Papers, BPL.
26 Douglass to Julia Griffiths, Lynn, October 13, 1847, Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:262; Janet Douglas, “A Cherished Friendship: Julia Griffiths Crofts and Frederick Douglass,” Slavery and Abolition, June 2012, 265–66. Douglass’s letter to Griffiths was reprinted in NASS, January 13, 1848.
27 Douglass to Amy Post, Boston, October 28, 1847; Douglass to Jonathan D. Carr, Lynn, November 1, 1847; Douglass to Martin R. Delany, Rochester, January 19, 1848, Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:266–67, 282–83, 283n6; North Star, December 3, 1847. On how early Douglass began to embrace political antislavery, see Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War, 28–30; and James Oakes, The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics (New York: Norton, 2007), 14–17. Also see Stauffer, Giants, 133–35; McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 149–50; Quarles, Frederick Douglass, 80–83.
28 North Star, December 3, 1847.
29 Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:268n7; McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 152–53; Gerrit Smith to Douglass, Peterboro, NY, December 8, 1847; David Ruggles to Douglass and Delany, Northampton, MA, January 1, 1848; and Henry O. Wagoner to Douglass, Chicago, January 27, 1848; Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:276–77, 281–82, 286–88.
30 Douglass to Delany, Rochester, January 12 and 19, 1847, FD Papers (LC); North Star, January 28, 1848; Robert S. Levine, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 18–22.
31 Levine, Delany, Douglass, 32–48; Delany to Douglass, North Star, January 28, March 27, April 15 and 28, and June 7 and 18, 1848; Douglass, “What Are the Colored People Doing for Themselves?,” North Star, July 14, 1848, in Foner, Life and Writings, 1:314–20.
32 Delany to Douglass, North Star, April 15, May 20, and June 9, 1848. See Douglass, “The War with Mexico” and “Northern Whigs and Democrats,” North Star, January 21 and July 7, 1848.
33 Douglass to Isaac Post, Rochester, February 3, 1848; Douglass to Abigail and Lydia Mott, Rochester, February 21, 1848; Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:290–91, 297–98.
34 McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 153–55; Stauffer, Giants, 135–36; Jane Marsh Parker, “Reminiscences of Frederick Douglass,” Outlook 51 (April 6, 1895): 552; Charles R. Douglass, “Some Incidents in the Home Life of Frederick Douglass,” February 17, 1917, an address delivered at the hundredth anniversary of his father’s birth, Evans Collection, “Assorted Materials” box.
35 Douglass to Julia Griffiths, Rochester, April 28, 1848, Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:302–3.
36 Bondage, 291; North Star, December 3, 1847; Life and Times, 264. See Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War, 18.
37 Lori D. Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life (New York: Hill & Wang, 2009), 56–62; Philip S. Foner, ed., Frederick Douglass on Women’s Rights (New York: DaCapo Press, 1992), 4–24; Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men, 224–26; Waldo Martin, The Mind of Frederick Douglass (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 145–50; McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 155–56.
38 “The Rights of Women,” North Star, July 28, 1848; Life and Times, 472–74.
39 McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 152; Stauffer, Giants, 33.
40 Douglass, “A Day, a Deed, an Event, Glorious in the Annals of Philanthropy,” address delivered in Rochester, NY, August 1, 1848, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 2:135, 142.
41 Ibid., 141; Douglass, “The Slave’s Right to Revolt,” address in Boston, May 30, 1848, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 2:131–33. Also see “The North and the Presidency,” “Northern Whigs and Democrats,” North Star, March 17 and July 7, 1848.
42 Douglass to Thomas Auld, Rochester, September 3, 1848, in Foner, Life and Writings, 1:336–43. The letter was reprinted widely in the antislavery press and even in Southern newspapers. See NASS, September 14, 1848; Liberator, September 22, 1848. As “Letter to his old Master,” the document was also reprinted as part of the appendix of My Bondage and My Freedom in 1855.
43 McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 158; Douglass to Auld, September 3, 1848, 337, 343. See John Jacobus Flournoy to Douglass, Athens, GA, November 10, 1848, Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:336–39.
44 Douglass to Auld, September 3, 1848, 338–39, 341. On Douglass’s claims to self-ownership and natural rights in this letter, see Nicholas Buccola, The Political Thought of Frederick Douglass (New York: NYU Press, 2012), 30–32.
45 Douglass to Auld, September 3, 1848, 341–42.
46 Ibid., 342–43. “The Blood of the Slave on the Skirts of the Northern People,” North Star, November 17, 1848. And see Martin, Mind of Frederick Douglass, 136–56.
47 “Blood of the Slave on the Skirts.”
48 Ibid.
1 “Men and Brothers,” May 7, 1950, address delivered in New York, AASS Annual Meeting, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 2:238.
2 Garrison to Helen Garrison, New York, May 7, 1850, Letters of WLG, 4:7; Kevin Kenny, ed., New Directions in Irish American History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 113–15; Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 2:237n1; Tyler Anbinder, “Isaiah Rynders and the Ironies of Popular Democracy in Antebellum New York,” in Contested Democracy: Freedom, Race and Power in American History, ed. Marisha Sinha and Penny von Eschew (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 3–53.
3 Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 2:238–39.
4 Ibid., 239–43; Garrison to editor of the New York Tribune, Boston, May 13, 1850, Letters of WLG, 4:12–13.
5 Rynders in New York Times, January 14, 1885, in Anbinder, “Isaiah Rynders,” 40.
6 Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 2:513n4; Maria Diedrich, Love Across Color Lines: Ottilie Assing & Frederick Douglass (New York: Hill & Wang, 1999), 181; McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 162–71.
7 London Times, June 10 and 11, 1850; “At Home Again,” North Star, May 30, 1850.
8 “At Home Again.”
9 “Prejudice against Color,” North Star, June 13, 1850; Douglass to editor of the London Times, Rochester, June 29, 1850, in Foner, Life and Writings, 2:131.
10 Sarah Meer, “Public and Personal Letters: Julia Griffiths and Frederick Douglass’ Paper,” Slavery and Abolition, June 2012, 253; Janet Douglas, “A Cherished Friendship: Julia Griffiths Crofts and Frederick Douglass,” Slavery and Abolition, June 2012, 266. The song was published in New Monthly Belle Assemblee 26 (1847): 125. McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 145. For Griffiths’s Literary Notices, and her own literary flare, see Frederick Douglass’ Paper (hereafter FDP), October 15 and November 2, 1852, and many other issues.
11 Post and May quotes in Douglas, “Cherished Friendship,” 267; Thompson quote in Clare Taylor, British and American Abolitionists: An Episode in Transatlantic Understanding (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1974), 376.
12 Erwin Palmer, “A Partnership in the Abolition Movement,” University of Rochester Library Bulletin 26 (1970–71): 1–5; Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:385n5, 398n2.
13 Julia Griffiths to Gerrit Smith, 1850, n.d., Gerrit Smith Papers (hereafter GS Papers), University of Syracuse Library.
14 Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men, 71–82, 102–104, 98–108; Lawrence J. Friedman, “The Gerrit Smith Circle: Abolitionism in the Burned-Over District,” Civil War History 26 (March 1980): 18–38.
15 Gerrit Smith to Douglass, March 16 and March 30, 1849, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 2:371–72, 377–78; Douglass to Gerrit Smith, March 18 and March 30, 1849, GS Papers.
16 Howard W. Coles, The Cradle of Freedom: A History of the Negro in Rochester, Western New York and Canada, vol. 1 (Rochester: Oxford Publishers, 1941), 129–30, 158.
17 Griffiths to Smith, two letters, 1850, n.d., GS Papers.
18 Smith to Griffiths, July 25, 1851, GS Papers; FDP, July 17 and 24, 1851. On Douglass and his photographs, see Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men, 45–56; and especially John Stauffer, Zoe Trodd, and Celeste Bernier, Picturing Frederick Douglass (New York: Liveright, 2015), intro.
19 Griffiths to Smith, July 23, 1851, August 26, 1851, GS Papers. Further examples of Julia’s appeals for money are Griffiths to Smith, February 22 and 28, 1851, July 19, 1851, GS Papers.
20 Douglass to Smith, September 3, 1851; Griffiths to Smith, October 26, 1852, GS Papers; FDP, July 24, 1851; Michael S. Kimmel, “The Birth of the Self-Made Man,” in Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 11–20.
21 Griffiths to Smith, November 24, 1851, GS Papers. Robert Burns, “The Cotter’s Saturday Night,” http://www.robertburns.org.uk/Assets/Poems_Songs/cotters_saturday_night.htm. On Douglass’s shared veneration for Burns, see Meer, “Public and Personal Letters,” 260–61. FDP, December 4, 11, and 18, 1851.
22 Coles, Cradle of Freedom, 156–57; Douglass Sprague, “My Mother as I Recall Her,” 6.
23 Douglass to Smith, May 21, June 10, and May 1, 1851, GS Papers. On the idea of “companionate marriage,” and how some radical abolitionists tried to forge such equality in matrimony, see Chris Dixon, Perfecting the Family: Antislavery Marriages in Nineteenth Century America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 7–20, 157–233.
24 For Smith pleading with Douglass on constitutionalism, see Smith to Douglass, February 9, 1849, Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:356–57; Luther R. Marsh, ed., Writings and Speeches of Alvan Stewart on Slavery (New York, 1860); William Goodell, Views of American Constitutional Law, in Its Bearing upon American Slavery (n.p., 1844); Lysander Spooner, The Unconstitutionality of Slavery, 2nd ed. (1845; repr., New York, 1965); John R. McKivigan, “The Frederick Douglass–Gerrit Smith Friendship and Political Abolitionism in the 1850s,” in Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 205–32; Richard H. Sewell, Ballots for Freedom: Antislavery Politics in the United States, 1837–1860 (New York: Norton, 1976), 94–95; Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War, 26–34.
25 On Chase’s view, see Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 73–77, 83–87; and Salmon Chase to Douglass, January 23, 1849; Douglass to Salmon Chase, February 2, 1849; in Foner, Life and Writings, 1:352–53.
26 Douglass to C. H. Chase, February 9, 1849, Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:355; Douglass to Salmon Chase, North Star, February 8, 1849. C. H. Chase, no relation to Salmon, is Charles Chase of Brighton, New York, who had challenged Douglass to debate the constitutionality of slavery. On Douglass’s political philosophy, see Buccola, Political Thought of Frederick Douglass, 1–14, 142–43; and David E. Schrader, “Natural Law in the Constitutional Thought of Frederick Douglass,” in Frederick Douglass: A Critical Reader, ed. Bill E. Lawson and Frank M. Kirkland (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999), 85–99. On Douglass’s shift toward Smith’s legal views, see Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men, 160, 162–66.
27 North Star, April 5, 1850; Oakes, Radical and the Republican, 92.
28 Douglass to Smith, January 31, 1851, GS Papers.
29 Smith to Douglass, June 9, 1851, Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:452–53.
30 North Star, May 15, 1851; Liberator, May 23, 1851.
31 Douglass to Smith, May 21 and June 10, 1851, GS Papers. Also see Douglass to Smith, May 1, May 15, May 28, May 29, June 4, June 10, and June 18, 1851, GS Papers.
32 Isabel Jennings to Mary Estlin, Cork, Ireland, May 24, 1851; Abby Kelley Foster to Garrison, March 30, 1852; WLG Papers, BPL; Anne Weston to Maria Weston Chapman, June 5, 1849, Weston Family Papers, BPL. And see McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 170.
33 “The Annual Meeting of the American Antislavery Society,” FDP, May 20, 1852; Douglass to Gerrit Smith, May 15, 1852, GS Papers. Accounts of the Garrison-Douglass breakup are in Foner, Life and Writings, 53–60; and Quarles, Frederick Douglass, 70–79.
34 FDP, May 20, 1852. Douglass to Gerrit Smith, April 15, 1852, GS Papers. The alleged contribution to Douglass’s paper was by Benjamin Coates, of Philadelphia, just before the AASS convention in Rochester. FDP, March 11 and May 20, 1852.
35 FDP, June 24, 1852. On the changing times, AASS, and the Garrison-Douglass dispute, see Stewart, William Lloyd Garrison, 133–41; and Mayer, All on Fire, 128–33. Mayer’s account is sympathetic to Garrison. On Stowe’s book, see David S. Reynolds, Mightier than the Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America (New York: Norton, 2011).
36 Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” Leaves of Grass, in The Portable Walt Whitman (New York: Penguin, 1945), 95–96.
37 FDP, May 20, 1852; Douglass to Gerrit Smith, May 15, 1852, GS Papers. See Heschel, Prophets, 103–39, 145–58.
38 FDP, May 20, 1852; Douglass to Gerrit Smith, May 15, 1852, GS Papers; Othello, act 3, sc. 3.
39 Douglass to Gerrit Smith, July 14, 1852, GS Papers.
40 Anna Douglass quoted in Susan B. Anthony to Garrison, December 13, 1853, quoted in Mayer, All on Fire, 431; Douglass to Samuel D. Porter, January 12, 1852 (likely misdated, this should be 1853), Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:512–13; Leigh Fought, The Women in the World of Frederick Douglass (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 133–41.
41 FDP, May 27 and August 19, 1853. Also see Douglas, “Cherished Friendship,” 267–68; McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 171, 175.
42 FDP, August 19 and December 9, 1853; Liberator, September 16, 1853; Douglass to Gerrit Smith, August 18, 1853, GS Papers.
43 FDP, March 2 and 16, 1855; FDP, January 7, 1859. On Douglass’s disputes with Brown, see Ezra Greenspan, William Wells Brown: An African American Life (New York: Norton, 2014), 317–20.
44 Liberator, September 16 and 23, and November 18, 1853; reprinted in FDP, December 9, 1853.
45 From Liberator, November 18, 1853, reprinted in FDP, December 9, 1853; NASS, September 24, 1853; Oliver Johnson to Garrison, December 10, 1853, quoted in Foner, Life and Writings, 2:59.
46 Liberator, December 16, 1853; FDP, January 7, 1853, and December 9, 1853. The book sold for seventy-five cents. Julia Griffiths, ed., Autographs for Freedom (Boston: Jewett and Company, 1853); Julia Griffiths, ed., Autographs for Freedom (Rochester: Wanzer, Beardsley, and Company, 1854), copies in Beinecke Library, Yale University. The array of writers in the two volumes included, among others, William H. Seward, Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Greenleaf Whittier, Charles Sumner, Horace Greeley, James Birney, Joshua Giddings, Theodore Parker, and, in volume 2, none other than Ralph Waldo Emerson, weighing in with a poem, “Freedom.” On Douglass’s pride in Julia’s role in the Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society of Rochester, see Douglass to Gerrit Smith, September 3, 1851, GS Papers.
47 Robert Purvis to Garrison, Liberator, September 16, 1853; William Cooper Nell to Amy Post, August or September, n.d., 1853; August 12, 1853; December 10, 1853; December 20, 1853; January 20, 1854; Post Family Papers, Rare Books and Special Collections, University of Rochester Library.
48 FDP, December 9, 1853.
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid.
51 Ibid.
52 Garrison to Harriet Beecher Stowe, November 30, 1853, in Letters of WLG, 4:280–86; Stowe to Garrison, December 19, 1853, in Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe, ed. Annie Fields (London: Sampson Low, Marston and Company, 1898), 214–15, copy in Rare Book Room, Cambridge University Library, UK. On the Stowe meetings, see McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 178.