Frederick Douglass crossed boundaries and made connections in a life that started as a slave and ended as the first great national African-American leader. He was America's best known black author, publishing newspapers and magazines that were read by thousands of people, black and white. He told his life story three different times, with each version being read by thousands of admirers. But most important, for over half a century, Frederick Douglass was the voice of black America. He spoke out on numerous issues and stood up for the rights of his people to enjoy the full dignity of their hard won citizenship.
Born a slave in 1818 in Talbot County, Maryland, his mother named him Frederick Bailey. He rarely saw her and spent his early years with his grandmother. When his owner died, young Frederick was sent to work for Thomas and Sophia Auld. Mrs. Auld recognized something of his intellectual ability and taught him to read, not realizing that Southern states had made it a crime. They understood that a slave who could read would aspire to be something more than his society would allow. Mr. Auld understood this and was enraged. Douglass recalled how Auld claimed, "Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world." At age sixteen Mr. Auld assigned Frederick to work for Edward Covey, whom Douglass called a "nigger-breaker." Covey ran a small farm, but more importantly, his job was to break the will of unruly slaves like Frederick. Covey treated him miserably. He tried to run to his master for protection, but Mr. Auld sent him back. Covey began to beat him, but Frederick refused to take his punishment. For two hours he fought with Covey, and held him off. Douglass recalled that this battle "was the turning point in my 'life as a slave.'" He claimed that "I was nothing before; I WAS A MAN NOW." He resolved to seek his own freedom.
Douglass was fortunate enough to get the opportunity to learn a marketable skill and to hire out his own time. He sought his own jobs as a ship's caulker and paid his owner $3.00 per week, keeping whatever was left for himself. This gave him the kind of skills and personal freedom he would need to seek his freedom. In 1838 at the age of 20, carrying borrowed papers, he escaped from slavery and fled to New Bedford, Massachusetts. He renamed himself Frederick Douglass, after a character in a Sir Walter Scott poem.
Having crossed the one boundary of slavery, Douglass soon made one of the most important connections in his life. He accepted a trial subscription to The Liberator, a newspaper that advocated the immediate abolition of slavery. "I was brought in contact with the mind of William Lloyd Garrison," the paper's editor. In 1839 Douglass made his first antislavery speech and he soon launched a career as a professional speaker, denouncing slavery at every step. For about six years Douglass worked closely with Garrison. Douglass's job was to provide first-hand testimony on the horrors he had seen as a slave. But it was not his job to explain his own views. Whites feared that he had become so articulate that no one would believe he was really a former slave. He grew frustrated over the limits his white allies imposed. "We will take care of the philosophy. Let us have the facts." However much the white abolitionists shared Douglass's condemnation of slavery, they had not freed themselves from a patronizing attitude toward African-Americans. Douglass was unwilling to remain frozen in the state of being a fugitive slave. In 1847, to allow the fullest expression of his own ideas, he moved to Rochester, NY, and founded his own newspaper, The North Star.
Douglass believed that slavery was only the clearest manifestation of race prejudice. Prejudice was a "moral disorder" and the result of "diseased imagination." It was irrational, evil, unnatural, and unjust. He struggled for "First, the freedom of the blacks in this country, and second, the elevation of them." The best argument one could make in favor of emancipating the slaves was to provide opportunities for the free African-Americans of the North to advance. Douglass soon became the chief spokesman for the free black community in its denunciation of both slavery and racism.
Shortly after beginning his new paper, Douglass made an additional connection that would be with him for the rest of his life. In 1848 he attended the first women's rights convention, held in Senaca Falls, New York, organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott. As African-Americans had found discrimination within the abolition movement, so had women. In 1840 organizers denied Stanton and Mott entrance to an antislavery meeting in London because they were women. When they returned to the United States, they resolved that they would work to secure the rights of women. Douglass went to the meeting and was the only man in attendance to support the call for equal voting rights, seconding the resolution. Throughout his life Douglass actively endorsed equal rights for women, seeing that the cause of women's rights was connected to the broader goals of human equality. The opening issue of The North Star proclaimed the feminist slogan: "Right is of no sex."
Douglass supported rights for women in the political sphere, but he did not promote equal rights in his personal sphere. He rejected the common notion that granting women equal political rights would interfere with their ability to perform their domestic duties. Anna Murray Douglass, his wife of forty-two years, never learned to read and remained unseen, rarely venturing into the public realm he created for himself. Although he denounced men who treated women "as a drudge," there was little in his married life that challenged the conventional sex-roles of his day. He did have close woman friends who were his peers.
By supporting women's suffrage, Douglass was moving away from his ties to William Lloyd Garrison. Many of Garrison's followers had opposed the demand, not because they believed that women should not possess the vote. They believed instead that by voting were giving their support to a government that tolerated slavery. Garrison believed that slavery had thoroughly corrupted the United States government. He called for the northern states to secede from the Union. Garrison's followers did not participate in politics or vote. Douglass increasingly came to see the possibilities for securing the rights of African-Americans by mobilizing voters. He condemned slavery as strongly as ever. But he supported the call to form an abolitionist political party and use the ballot box in the battle against slavery.
In the years leading up to the Civil War, Frederick Douglass was the most widely read and widely quoted African-American in the United States. He spoke out on every major issue facing Americans, either in the pages of his newspaper (which he had renamed Frederick Douglass' Paper) or as a lecturer. In October 1854, for example, he addressed a throng of fifteen hundred people in Chicago. The Kansas-Nebraska Act that year had opened Kansas Territory to slavery. He told them that God would not allow this outrage to stand. He called for one thousand free black people to emigrate to the territory to wrest it from the hands of slaveholders.
In 1861 the Civil War provided Douglass with his greatest challenge and his greatest opportunity. Most whites endorsed the idea that this was a "white man's war." The Union proclaimed its intention to leave slavery as it was and to permit no black men to serve as soldiers. Douglass joined with other abolitionists to form the Emancipation League. He urged President Abraham Lincoln to move quickly to emancipate the slaves and to allow African-Americans to serve in the Union army. "We are striking the guilty Rebels with our soft white hand, when we should be striking with the iron hand of the black man." Douglass joined in a massive celebration when on January 1, 1863 President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing the slaves in Rebel-held territory.
Douglass believed that if African-Americans were to claim the rights of citizenship, they would need to bear its burdens. When the War Department announced that it would accept black soldiers, Douglass set to work recruiting them. "Liberty won by white men would lose half its luster. 'Who would be free themselves must strike the blow.'" He urged that black men take up arms: "The chance is now given you to end in a day the bondage of centuries, and to rise in one bound from social degradation to . . . common equality with all other varieties of men." He went on a recruiting tour of western New York. His sons, Charles and Lewis, were among the first to join the most famous black regiment, the Massachusetts 54th.
Although the slaves won their freedom, securing it permanently would require further struggle. Immediately after the Civil War, Southern legislatures passed a series of "Black Codes." These laws defined the black place in the post-war South as a second-class citizen. Black Codes prohibited African-Americans from owning or renting farm land or from working as anything other than a field hand. Former slaves who refused to accept this meager freedom could be arrested as vagrants and auctioned off to the highest bidder.
Douglass continued his role as an advocate of the rights of his people. "Without the elective franchise," he claimed, "the Negro will still be practically a slave." Neither President Lincoln nor Andrew Johnson, the man who took the office after Lincoln's assassination, had any intention of supporting these demands. But Northern members of Congress refused to re-admit the Southern states. They demanded some recognition for the contribution that African-Americans had made to the struggle. They drafted the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which requires states to grant equality before the law. When most Southern states refused to ratify the Amendment, in 1867 Congress required that they allow black men to vote before being re-admitted. The Fourteenth Amendment became part of the Constitution in 1868. Two years later the Fifteenth Amendment prohibited states from denying anyone the vote because of race. Douglass hoped that black people could finally handle their own affairs without outside help.
Douglass spent much of his later years on a variety of enterprises that did not turn out well. In 1870 he bought a newspaper, the New National Era. Despite his efforts and those of his sons, it could not survive the depression that broke out in 1873 and folded the following year. In 1871 President Ulysses S. Grant appointed him to serve on a commission that travelled to Santo Domingo (known today as the Dominican Republic). They examined a proposal to have the United States annex the country. He supported the proposal, though the United States Senate rejected it. On the trip home, Douglass was denied the right to eat in the ship's dinning room and was the only commissioner not invited to eat at the White House. In 1874 Douglass also agreed to serve as president of the Freedman's Savings and Trust Company, a savings bank for African Americans. It, too, could not survive the Panic of 1873 and went bankrupt soon afterwards. As late as 1890 Douglass was helping claimants get some of their money back.
Although he held several smaller positions, including a two-year stint as consul-general to Haiti, Douglass never received the political influence he aspired to gain. He continued to speak out on the major issues of his day. He joined the anti-lynching crusader, Ida B. Wells, and in 1894 published a major article denouncing the practice. Responding to his critics, Douglass published his last great essay "The Lessons of the Hour; Why the Negro is Lynched." He reiterated his life-long commitment to equal rights and justice. The acts of violence were in no way justified. He denounced the growing pattern throughout the South that used bogus literacy tests and property qualifications to deny the vote to black people. "Take the ballot from the Negro and you take from him all means and motives that make for education."
On February 20, 1895 Frederick Douglass attended a meeting of the National Council of Women, and organization working to win the vote. He returned home and died of a heart attack. Thousands of people from distinguished statesmen to school children mourned his passing. He was hailed as the greatest African-American leader of the nineteenth century.
In 1965 Douglass's biographer, Benjamin Quarles, gave a speech at the dedication of the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge, which connects the black community of Anacostia (southeastern Washington, D.C.) to the rest of the city. He observed that Frederick Douglass was a bridge builder in human relations, a man who made it possible for others to make their way to cross over. In a three-fold sense Douglass was a bridge-builder, a bridge between slavery and freedom, between Negroes and whites, between struggle and success. Douglass signified a bridge between 'humble birth and high purpose.'